In mid-October, I had a toothache. As anyone who knows me is aware, this is far from an unusual occurrence. In fact, ever since grad school, my teeth have been an utter mess and I don’t seem able to get a handle on the situation. So every once in a while I suffer a toothache and have to cope with it, which I usually do by dosing myself with 1000 mg’s of Motrin at regular intervals until I can see my dentist.
During this particular cycle that turned out to be on 2008 October 24. I visited my usual dentist and laid out my agony. He wasn’t surprised, either, especially since my last x-rays had revealed an old crown that was on the verge of failing. Naturally, we both assumed this had happened and that the old cavity lay exposed to new decay. He tapped around my mouth for a few minutes (and after a lifetime of instructions not to stick sharp metal objects in one’s mouth, a visit to the dentist is guaranteed to be harrowing), and came to the unexpected conclusion that the crown had held. In fact, there was no sign of decay anywhere near the tooth that was hurting.
Somehow being told that did not cause the pain to go away.
The dentist probed a little more and discovered significant decay on the wisdom tooth nearby. In a shocking (yet disturbingly common) case of bad wiring, the pain signals from that tooth were being reported to my brain as coming from the healthy tooth. This “misplaced pain” is a known phenomenon in dental medicine. In fact I’d previously suffered a bout of it with a different wisdom tooth, so in retrospect it wasn’t all that shocking. In the earlier case, I’d popped over to the oral surgeon, he pulled the tooth, and I lived happily ever after (at least, until this new problem).
The receptionist placed a call over to the same oral surgeon and, quite luckily, he had a slot open right then. Even better, he was within literal walking distance from the dentist’s office. So I pulled on my jacket, pulled out the iPod, and hiked over to the surgeon’s, where I was immediately seated and my vitals taken pro forma.
And that‘s where the story took an unexpected turn…
The oral surgeon ended up refusing to work on me that day. He had taken my blood pressure and pulse, as a routine matter. His qualitative interpretation? He couldn’t understand how I was still up and walking around. Quantitatively, the readings were something like 180 over 120. (I didn’t really understand blood pressure metrics at the time, though a quick search on Wikipedia cleared things up.)
This was, as you might expect, Bad News. Indeed, the oral surgeon called off all work and insisted I see a cardiologist to have the problem addressed. Having a toothache was a lot less troubling than having a heart attack, so the cost/benefit analysis made sense to me too. Unfortunately, I’ve neglected to ever find a GP (a situation now corrected) so finding a cardiologist was challenging. The surgeon’s office called someone he knew and checked that AmeriHealth would cover him. It would (and did), so I had an appointment set up for four days later.
Although things have settled down now and seem to be more under control, I would likely not have made any lifestyle changes without the wake-up call of being refused service by the oral surgeon. That set off a whole chain of events from beginning an exercise program to adopting a crash diet to finally shed pounds I should never have allowed accrue. Without these changes, my cardiologist believes I would have ended up with a heart attack of some sort within a short while. And I would never have seen the surgeon if my tooth hadn’t given me such pain.
So it’s really only the slightest exaggeration — and perhaps not one at all — to say that the toothache did in fact save my life.
More on the fallout in later installments.
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