Fat face!

Hopefully this will be the singularly most unflattering picture I will ever post here so if you have a mind to crack jokes take your chance now, the fact that my head appears to be rectangular I hope is down to the poor lens on my phone, the rest,well it is what it is!

As anyone who has visited here before will know (only too well I hear you mutter)I have some significant dental issues, the teeth all look fine but they are far from it. In part it's just misfortune, I have always taken good care of them but in larger part it's down to the inefficiency of the N.H.S. dental services and in my opinion, the greed of dentists. I won't regale you with the years of problems I have had, the are well documented here already and as ever I suspect the word 'greed' and 'dentists' in one sentence will lay me open again to comment hassle from the profession but it is a fact, yet again I am suffering because the dentist I currently have wouldn't carry out the treatment at N.H.S. charges (I am an N.H.S. patient), preferring instead to require me to pay the private fee of just short of £2000...or no deal! Gotta love the caring professions!

Anyhow, all that aside, Christmas Eve saw me begin to 'nurture' yet another abscess, hey, I'm used to the damn things, I have emergency antibiotics always on stand-by and I duly began the course but this one it transpired, was to be the mother of all abbesses and it paid little heed to the meds, in fact no heed at all and by Christmas morning the 'Fat Face' had grown to it's almost full glory.

I can honestly say I have never known pain like it. It was utterly horrible and not what I had asked Santa for at all!. Christmas Day was a wash out, I did manage to suck my way through the soft bits of a Christmas lunch but aside from that I spent most of the day either on the phone to N.H.S. Direct or waiting for their dentist to call me back. I was trying to ignore the 'comforting' words of my own dentist that one can expire from this ailment and even if I had I felt inclined too I couldn't even raise a smile....my mouth wouldn't move in the smile direction.

The long and the short of it is that I was referred to A & E, who much to my chagrin took the whole situation scarily too seriously for my liking but ultimately posted me back out the door with two types of antibiotics and a string of other instructions and pain meds. In total I was taking, until yesterday, 23 tablets a day. I don't do pain meds! Well not usually but really, this time it was off my usual coping scale.

I now merely sport a rather large gob-stopper in the side of my face, my eye and my chin seem to have reappeared, I am down to 18 tablets and I have an appointment late next week with a new dentist the hospital recommended.

Oh hell, now all I have to do is face the fear, it's going to be two root canals and an extraction is my best guess but I'm trying not to think about it......yet :(

....but on the positive side, though my holiday has been crap, it would have been a whole lot worse to have to go to work feeling like this!