GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #814: OH, THE SPINAL INJECTIONS YOU'RE GOING TO GET!

 I think I might have mentioned here that I've been getting spinal injections for my bad foot and for the pain in my back. I've had three of them so far, and the fourth and final one is scheduled for next Thursday.

Except . . .

Today I saw the doctor I originally saw for this, not the pain clinic doc. We were discussing next steps, and I told him about the injections. He said he does those procedures himself and knows they're good, and he's glad I'm feeling better, but he doesn't think that last injection will help me. It will be the same as the one I got last Thursday, meaning it won't be different like the other two. It's for arthritis in my back, and he doesn't think it will help with what he thinks is causing the pain.

Because now that I've had an MRI he can see the discs between my vertebrae. Two of them we already knew were too thin, but now we can see they're bulging, too. Not much. Just enough to cause the pain. He says an epidural injection would be more beneficial to me, and that it should kill the pain but good.

So now I'm wondering what the hell I should do. I'm leaning toward doing the epidural and canceling next week's injection, but I want to talk to the pain clinic first. I also have a bunch of new info in my MyChart to look over in regards to the epidural. It's not a decision I need to make today, so I'm going to think about it tomorrow and over the weekend. I'll figure it out by Monday.

To do one spinal injection, or to do a different one? It's gonna suck either way. I view it as an Alien v Predator situation: whoever wins, we lose.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #589: PAIN NEVER GOES AWAY

 Pain has been on my mind a lot lately. Not only is there the constant pain of my bad left foot, but now I'm discovering the pain of getting old. I thought I already had, but it's on a new level now.

And this pain doesn't go away.

Drinking always took the pain away. As good as quitting booze has been for me, I sometimes curse the day that I stopped drinking. If I had some whiskey right now, I wouldn't be thinking about this fucking pain. I wouldn't feel it, or at least it would be so far away that it wouldn't be worth noticing.

All my joints are fucked. My right knee wants to complain every time I move the fucking thing. My tennis elbow is still killing me. My wrists are constantly bitching at me, and only one of them has any reason to. (I'm looking at you, Leftie. Jerking off didn't take too long today. What gives?) And now it feels like two of my fingers on my right hand are dislocated. I know they're not, but neither of them feel connected at the mid knuckle. Every time I flex them I feel them pop like they're almost about to get back into place but never do.

The only way I can stand is by groaning and cursing. When I stand at work, I keep my mouth shut, but I hobble for the first few steps.

Getting old sucks. 0/10. Would not recommend.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #208: MY SHIT TOOTH (REVISITED)

For those of you who have known me a while I've been having problems with my Shit Tooth for years. It all began when I started getting monstrously evil headaches, and I had no idea what caused them. I couldn't do anything about them at work, but when I got home I pounded whiskey to the point where I was downing 3/4 of a handle every night just to kill the pain. It was the only thing that worked. I went to several doctors, and none of them were able to solve the mystery until one of them came up with the brilliant plan to see a dentist.


I'd gone through most of my adult life without dental insurance. The last checkup I'd gotten was when I was getting into freshman year of high school. After that my grandparents, who raised me, lost their insurance plans. In 2007 I got a job that gave me benefits. (Just so you have a point of reference, I got into freshman year in 1992.) By that time I figured my teeth were fucked, and I didn't bother getting them checked out. To this day my mouth gives people The Fear.


I caved and went to the dentist. Apparently the tooth which would eventually be dubbed the Shit Tooth had a deep chip in it, which had exposed the nerve. The dentist put a giant filling on it, and everything went back to normal. Cool.


Fast forward a year. The Shit Tooth is killing me again. My alcohol use increased again. My dentist did a root canal and put a crown on the chip of tooth I had left back there.


A few weeks later I was eating pizza. Suddenly I took a bite and something seemed off. Something was missing. Holy shit, my tooth was gone! I have very little money. Crowns cost a lot even if you're insured. What did I do? I sifted through my shit for days looking for that crown. Hence, the Shit Tooth.


I never did find it, by the way. Not that it matters. It turns out the very little piece of tooth I had left had cracked. The dentist wouldn't have been able to put the crown back on.


This time he put a screw in my mouth to support the three centimeters of tooth I had left. It worked wonderfully after the crown got put on.


Fast forward to this year. My Shit Tooth acted up again. This time the dentist told me that there was decay built up under the crown. He sent me to another dentist out of hopes that it could be saved. The two options: remove the crown and drill out the decay, or cut into the gumline to drill out the decay. The other dentist said there was too much built up. The tooth had to go.


I've been through the process of an implant before. It sucks and it's expensive. I didn't want to do it. But I was told that if I didn't get it I would lose more of my teeth because the Shit Tooth took on a heavy burden in my under-bite.


I was going to go to another dentist to get the Shit Tooth pulled and to get an implant, but then SURPRISE! I got fired and lost my insurance. When I finally got a new job it took forever for my insurance to kick in. When it did I took a half-day to get a consultation. This was the day before I was going to go on a road trip with Kevin Strange to be on The Horror Show with Brian Keene. I thought the dentist was just going to take a look at it and schedule surgery for maybe two weeks later.


SURPRISE! It looked so bad that I was told it would crack out of my mouth over the weekend. The image of being interviewed by Brian Keene as I spat out my Shit Tooth horrified me, so I decided to do the emergency surgery then and there.


I should not have done that.


While the Shit Tooth is finally gone, it is still haunting me. Even now I have horrible pain in my mouth. The Orajel helps. The painkillers help, but they make me woozy. The whiskey is the best solution.


You know the phenomenon of phantom limbs? I have a phantom ghost tooth in my head right now, and it's killing me. (It doesn't help that I also have cadaver bone in my mouth to help make an implant possible. I don't know the guy or gal who donated it, but I do know that I've given Mike Lombardo a tickle in his tooth.) I've shoved a bunch of whiskey down my throat tonight, and it's only helping a little. I need this to go away. It would be so awesome to have just one day where I wake up and don't feel any pain in my mouth. I need that to happen tomorrow.


Goodnight, you wonderful people. Thanks for listening to me rant about this garbage.

EVERYONE'S GOT ONE #7: GALL BLADDER BLUES

It was the worst pain I’ve ever had to deal with, ten times worse than the stupid fucking abscess. It was even worse because whenever I got an attack, I would spend the entire day puking my guts out every other fifteen minutes. I had to go to the ER 10 times and wound up staying in the hospital twice. Do you know how much money that’s going to cost me?



Not even I can count that high. But the doctors couldn’t figure out my problem. They came up with a multitude of theories, from ulcer to allergic reactions to medications to rare flus, but nothing ever panned out. Not until they started looking at my gall bladder. But the problem was, I didn’t have stones, and when they gave me the test for sludge, someone forgot to inject me with the CCK (which would actually help detect the sludge).


But they figured it out the second time they gave me the test. When they told me my gall bladder would have to come out, I didn’t give it a second thought. “Take the fucker,” I said. I didn’t want to suffer through this pain anymore. I never considered that they’d actually have to cut me open and remove a part of me, that I would no longer be a complete human being.


Before you mention it, yes, I did have a tooth extracted. But they put an implant in to replace it. When they remove an organ, they don’t put a balloon or something in its place. The other organs sort of squish together into the vacuum (which causes a bubble to form and float up to one’s shoulder, where it pains one for a couple of days before it gets absorbed into the body).


I didn’t think about it until much later, when I had a lot of time to think. (Being out of work gives one a lot of time to think. And agonize. And think.) It was a relief to discover that they weren’t actually going to cut me open and yank out the gall bladder. Instead, they were going to make four very small incisions in my belly. Three were used for scopes and cameras and stuff, and the fourth was where they would insert an instrument that would suck out the offending organ. These cuts would be measured in millimeters, so that relieved me a great deal.


Better yet, they were going to knock me out for the whole thing. My previous experience with such things actually helped me look forward to the experience. I thought it was cool how they’d knock me out, and the next thing I knew, I’d be waking up with the procedure done. It wasn’t like going to sleep, it was like missing a segment of time. It was also guaranteed sleep time for me, which was important, since I’m an insomniac.


I went to the hospital on the day of the surgery. They set me up with my gown and hair cap and everything. They went over my information a hundred times, and they set me up with an IV. Then, they led me into the operating theater, and it was a truly impressive set up. They’re not lying on TV medical shows. I thought I was on the set for NIP/TUCK, it was that impressive.


I got up on the table, and they put a few blocks under me so I’d be in the most uncomfortable position ever (but it was to stretch out my belly so the doctor could properly operate on me). Then, they put the mask on me. I remember straightening out my nose so it would fit better, and the next thing I knew, I was in recovery with an ice pack on my stomach and my grandfather by my side, telling me everything went well.


But the nurse was in a hurry to get me out of there, since they were getting ready to close up for the day. Still groggy from being knocked out (and from the painkillers they’d just injected), the nurse had to help me get dressed while my grandfather got the car. By that point, I just wanted to get dressed, I didn’t care about my own nudity. I tossed my gown aside and stood up to pull my boxers and jeans up. The nurse, who was putting the leg of each around my feet, looked up in horror and pulled a blanket up to cover up my cock, since I was out in the middle of a hospital hallway with a bunch of people around me.


After a struggle, she got me dressed and in a wheelchair. Just moving caused me the greatest amount of pain. By the time I got home, I was eager to get back in bed and fall asleep. When I woke up, my grandfather had gotten my prescriptions for me, and I began gobbling painkillers.


And they made me sick. I spent the next few hours hovering over a bucket (because I couldn’t get to the bathroom) begging my own guts to stay down. As much pain as I was in, I couldn’t imagine how much worse it would get if I actually puked.

I managed to keep everything in and fell asleep again. When I woke up the next day, I got my first look at my belly. There were four huge bandages on me, including one over my belly button. And yes, they’d shaved my stomach. I am a very hairy man, so it looked very strange.


I started getting around a bit better then. The pain still kept me in bed for the most part, but after a few days, I felt strong enough to go Wizard World (as will be depicted in this column soon). That may have been a mistake, especially after eating their shitty pizza. The worst of it, though, was when I put on jeans with a belt. The nurse warned me against wearing a belt so soon, but that sounded stupid to me. As a result, about four hours into the con, I felt a bad pain under my belly. When I went to the bathroom, I saw that I had developed the world’s worst bruise in the shape of my belt buckle. It looked bad, like the sky at sunset with a hint of dusk creeping in.


Whoops.


I took off the bandages the next day. They told me to keep the sani-strips on, but they came off with the bandages. This freaked me out, so I quickly found some Band-Aids to put over the incisions. Surprisingly, the cuts were indeed very small, all except the one in my belly button, through which they pulled out my gall bladder. The way it was healing, it looked like my belly button had been disfigured. That’s not so good. When I was younger, I was prone to yeast infections in there. I hope they don’t come back as a result of this operation.


The only other problem I’ve had so far is the first bowel movement I had after the procedure. I was told that my shit would get so runny and wet that I’d be shooting diarrhea out of my ass for the next few weeks. As it turned out, the opposite happened. A lump of shit so big and hard built up in me that I couldn’t pass it. I sat straining on the toilet, and it just remained stuck in my asshole, too tough to come out. I tried prying open my own anus with my fingers to get it out. No dice. The doctor said I needed some milk of magnesia and mineral oil. In the meantime, I was stuck in the bathroom, in utter pain and desperation. Thankfully, my grandfather was around, and he went out to get my stuff for me.

I downed the awful concoction, but nothing happened. Three hours later, still on the toilet, this plug of shit finally came out. When I got a look at it, I gagged. It was the size of a child’s fist, rock hard. It was so tough, the toilet wouldn’t swallow it down. It stuck to the side of the porcelain like a barnacle.


After that, I got the expected diarrhea, which wasn’t pleasant. Too much blood from its predecessor. I never want to have to shit like that ever again.


Now, as I write this, I’m getting ready to go back to work. There is still a slight pain in my guts, and it’s there whenever I do anything except lie on my back. The painkillers do nothing for me unless I triple up on them. The bruise is finally starting to clear up. So things are good, I guess.


How about you guys? Anyone here ever have surgery? What did you have taken out? And did you get to keep it? I didn’t get to keep mine, no matter how much I pestered the doctor. Please leave a comment below.

TALES OF DENTISTRY CHAPTER FOUR

The mouthwash sucked at first. The taste wasn’t as bad as I was told it would be, but when it touched the empty spot where my tooth used to be, the pain nearly floored me. It was intense, no matter how easy I tried to be with it. It was as if someone had jabbed a needle into the empty trench in my mouth.



But after a while, it stopped hurting. The worst part about the long wait was keeping the trench clean after meals. Crumbs and stuff sometimes managed to get in there, and the only way to keep it clean was to use a syringe Dentist Three gave me to blast warm water in there. It worked, but after EVERY meal? That shit just got tedious, especially at work. I’d retire to the bathroom after lunch so I could clean out the cleft in my gums. People would then ask me questions. Even back at my desk, people would see the syringe and ask me all about it. It was a pain, and my junkie jokes got old fast.


But finally, there came the day when I would get my implant. First, I had to get the CT scan, to make sure this thing was going to work out. Best part: I had to pay for the whole thing at that moment. Yeah, about $200 for the scan, in advance. You’re starting to get the idea of how much this is costing me, right?


I sat down, and the scan went around my head, or at least it tried to. My shoulders were too high, and it kept brushing up against them. I tried my best to keep my head straight, but they had to do it again. There was no way to adjust it, either.


When it was done, the technician said, “Do you have a cold?”


“No,” I said.


“You’re going to have one soon.”


Sure enough, the next day I was sniffling.


I should mention that the people who did the scan were not affiliated with any of the dentists I’d seen by that point. However, they were in the same building as Dentist Two, who is the person who needs to see the scan results. I scheduled this thing a couple of weeks in advance of the implant appointment, to make sure there was plenty of time.


Just to make sure everything was going to go smoothly, one week before the appointment, I called Dentist Two to make sure they had the results. Guess what: they didn’t, and when they called the scan company about the issue, they claimed to have sent it off. Yeah, it got lost in the mail.


The mail. They are not only in the same FUCKING building, the scan company is on the floor below Dentist Two, almost directly below. All it would have taken was for someone to walk it up.


Well, things worked out anyway. Dentist Two got the scan just in time, and she said she thought everything was going to go well. It was time to get ready and get shot up with Novocain.


This time, when they put the blood pressure cuff on me, I scored well below the threshold. They congratulated me on this, and they decided that before, I was just too stressed out by having a tooth pulled. There was no real problem here.


They injected me and went to work drilling me. I tried to watch TV, but having so many tools shoved in my mouth was kind of distracting. In the background, some radio station played Mellencamp’s “Hurts So Good.” How fitting.


At one point, Dentist Two had to fit an extremely long, thick drill into my mouth, so I had to open up as widely as I could. There was barely enough room to fit it in. If not for the missing tooth, it wouldn’t have made it.


Now, they numbed me as much as they could, and for the most part, the procedure was painless. However, keep in mind that they were drilling all the way down into my jawbone. Yep, I felt it a bit. Every once in a while, they had to reload me on the Novocain, but it never reached down far enough to be completely painless.


Finally, it was time to put the implant in. Actually, it looked kind of like a wood screw. They experimented with different sizes until they realized that it would go in a little bit low on me (because of the crown lengthening). But then, after looking at my x-rays again, they saw that I bite with my back teeth (so much so that my front teeth don’t come together), so this tooth was not going to come into consideration when it came to chewing.


Now that this was determined, they started screwing the implant into me. I felt it getting tighter and tighter until I heard a click in my head.


“Wow, did you hear that?” Dentist Two asked. I couldn’t speak because I had a giant screwdriver in my mouth, so she continued: “That’s good news. Honestly, I didn’t know for sure if this implant was going to take hold. You lost a lot of bone, so much that I wondered if you actually got the bone graft. But that click means that this is going to stay in place. This is going to work.”


Well, that was good news . . . wait a minute! This she wasn’t certain?!


I let it go. Things were going to work out, so why quibble?


She snapped a cap over the implant and told me to use some of the mouthwash stuff she’d prescribed for me before to keep the cap clean. She also gave me a miniature brush to use to this end. If I didn’t use this, then it would get discolored and nasty and food might slip in under it.


When I looked at myself in the mirror, I saw what looked like a metal knob in my mouth where the tooth had once been. It looked tiny, and I wondered how they’d get a crown on that thing.


She told me to come back in three months, at which point she’d put the abutment on. Then, I’d be free to get my crown. At long last.


I was presented with my bill and sent on my way.


Tune in next time for the stunning conclusion. And remember to brush twice a day, floss, and all that jazz. You don’t want this to happen to you.

TALES OF DENTISTRY CHAPTER TWO

What is a crown lengthening procedure? It’s simple, really. It’s when they remove a swath of gums from under one of your teeth, thereby making the crown look bigger. This is what Dentist Two had in mind for me. The idea was to have the procedure done so Dentist One could see under the gums to see how far down the decay went. He would then make a decision about what we need to do with my bad tooth at that point.
Dentist Two was a chipper woman, whose abundance of energy somehow put me at ease. Not enough at ease that my blood pressure wasn’t rocketing, of course, but still, I was more relaxed than I expected to be.
About the high blood pressure: Dentist Two doesn’t do anything to you if your blood pressure is beyond a certain point. I was right there on the cusp. She kept testing me until I was relaxed to the point where she felt it was safe to give me Novocain.
There was really only one problem with the procedure: when they do this, they only numb your gums. You can still feel your teeth, and the bad one was pretty tender at this point. Every time she brushed up against it, I felt a jolt of pain. Now, speaking as one who had been through an immense amount of pain recently, I was able to take most of it, but there was one point when she actually tapped the tooth with a metal tool, and I jumped up hard enough to almost fall off the chair.
The procedure itself was pretty quick, though, which was merciful. It didn’t even seem all that scary. The worst part was watching her closing me up. The idea of stitches in my mouth absolutely terrified me. I didn’t even need to see the result to be frightened by it. Just seeing her pull the thread back was enough to gross me out.
When she finished, she handed me a mirror, and I saw that my tooth did, indeed, look bigger. There were two black blots in there, which I took to be the stitches. All in all, it didn’t look too bad. I showed it to some friends later, and they were shocked by it. In fact, they were kind of surprised that I could be up and about, knowing that there were stitches in my gums.
She gave me post-op instructions (including do not sip through a straw or spit for a day, and rinse my mouth out with saltwater a few times) and told me to come back in a week to have the stitches out. After that, I can go back to Dentist One for an examination. And if I experienced any pain, I should take a couple of Advil. Well, that sounded kind of small for oral pain, but as it turned out, it wasn’t so bad. I hardly felt a thing. Every once in a while, while eating, I felt something tug at the stitches, and that wasn’t comfortable. But that was the worst of it. Oh yeah, and I couldn’t eat anything sharp, like potato chips. That was actually the worst part, as I’m a huge fan of chips.
Anyway, I followed instructions, and when I got the stitches snipped and pulled out, Dentist Two said everything was looking very good. Cool.
I went back to Dentist One, and after poking around a bit, he said that he thought he could clear this up with a root canal. This wasn’t a promise. He said that things could still fall apart, but he thought it was worth a shot, that a root canal could possibly fix this.
Root canals are done in two parts. The first is to cut the top off your tooth and then to go in and file all the decay out, all the way down to the roots of your teeth. The second part is to close everything up with a crown after a few finishing touches. The tooth would then be a dead tooth, but it would still be in your mouth, right?
Okay, so I went in for part one, after having heard horror stories all my life about root canals. In actuality, it’s not all that bad. There is ZERO pain when they’re doing it. There is some discomfort because you have to keep your mouth open for a long time, but that’s the worst of it. The dentist then puts a bunch of files that look like needles into your tooth. It looks scary, I’ll tell you that, but again, there is ZERO pain. I was so loaded up on Novocain, you probably could have hit me in the mouth with a hammer, and I wouldn’t have felt it.
Then, there is the filler. If you hollow out your roots, you need something to fill the spot, right? He stuffed four rods into the tooth, which he then had to seal by setting them on fire. The assistant produced a lighter, which the dentist used to heat up a metal tool. As soon as it was hot enough, he pressed it into each root. The sizzle and the smell of burning tooth was kind of off-putting, but again, there is ZERO pain.
He then cooked up a temporary crown, which he glued in place. He told me to come back next week, and we’d finish up. He said everything looked very good, that he thought this was really going to work.
I went on my way. He told me if there was any pain, I should take a couple of Advil. This time, though, I did feel pain afterwards. Actually, a lot of it. That’s when it all catches up to you, after the procedure is done, not during. I got a jumbo bottle of Advil and slogged through the week.
There was one problem: half of my tongue remained numb when the rest of that side of my mouth came back to me. I couldn’t taste anything on that side for that entire week. Why? I’ll explain in a moment.
I went back, expecting everything to go smoothly. In fact, Dentist One said that since it was now a dead tooth, I wouldn’t need Novocain. But I was paranoid, so I asked him to shoot me up, anyway, which he gladly did.
At this point, I mentioned my half-numb tongue, and he said that it’s actually a common thing. When injecting Novocain, you’re supposed to just touch the nerve with the needle, but occasionally, the drug gets INTO the nerve. When this happens, numbness can continue indefinitely. Now THAT is scary. I asked how long this would last, and he said sometimes it takes a few weeks, sometimes a few months. There are some cases in which the tongue remains numb forever.
I tried to keep that out of my mind as he started poking around in my mouth. He took the temporary crown off and probed into the tooth. As he was doing this, he cursed.
“What’s up?” I asked, or at least, I tried to ask. My mouth was open too wide at this point.
“It might be too late to save the tooth,” he said. “I need an x-ray to make sure, but just sit tight for a moment.”
They took an x-ray, and when Dentist One returned, he pointed out the trouble area. “The tooth’s got to go. This is why.” He pointed out a crack in the root of the tooth, right there by the jaw. Apparently, the bottom of the tooth was in two pieces, and nothing can fix that. “The decay just went too deep.”
As he put the temporary crown back in, he told me my options. There were three. First, I could get an implant. It would take a lot of time, almost a year, and a lot of money, thousands of dollars. But it was the best option. Secondly, I could get a bridge. This involved sanding down the teeth on either side of the gap and affixing a piece over the space, using the filed down teeth as anchors. This was the most popular solution, but it tended to wear down the bone in the jaw in the blank spot, and it put undue stress on the anchor teeth. Lastly, I could just let it go. Just deal with the empty space.
The last one wasn’t an option for me. At the time, I was 31 years old. Too young for missing teeth. If I was in my sixties, I would have just dealt with it. I didn’t know about the other two, though. I spoke with my friend, Jason, about it. He lost one of his upper front teeth, and he wound up getting a bridge to fix it. He never had any complaints about it, but in the end, I chose to get an implant. It sounded sturdier and healthier from what the dentist told me.
Dentist One then said for me to go back to Dentist Two. She specializes in implants, and she knew how to prepare for it when pulling the tooth. (I was also told about same-day implants, but those are actually not very sturdy at all. They’re actually kind of a scam.)
So, I made an appointment with Dentist Two to have the tooth pulled and the preparations for an implant to begin. Tune in next time for that account, and to find out how a THIRD dentist got involved . . . .

[WHAT FOLLOWS IS A PICTURE OF THE TEMPORARY CROWN, EVEN THOUGH IT'S NOT VERY CLEAR.]