Mingo.Life

Continued from part one, click here to catch up.

Alas, lady luck further abandons me like an apple core thrown from a BMW driver’s window, or a single puzzle piece at the bottom of my daughter’s toy box. On the night of day 5, I’d fallen asleep feeling hopeful that there was some truth to the 3-5 days recovery I’d been quoted. It had to work for some people, otherwise they wouldn’t print it in the official leaflets, right? Not this guy, unfortunately. Emma said I’m the opposite of that character, Domino, in Deadpool 2 – bad luck just follows me.

Side note: This post actually published itself very cheekily whilst I was still working on it. If you’ve managed to read an early, unfinished version, congratulations! Sneak level: 100. Here’s the final article, and I’d like it to be all sunshine and rainbows, but…

Time for things to get rather annoyingly worse.

Day 6: Trismus

Along came another unexpected post-surgical complication.

Trismus. Lock Jaw.

I stirred in the night and tried to turn my head to tap my phone to find out what ungodly hour it was. Only, I couldn’t move my neck. My brain had told my body to move, but yet I was still lying there facing straight up at the ceiling. With a more concerted effort, I twisted my neck to one side. Bad move. AAARRGGHHHH! The yell woke up Emma and the baby as my neck crunched and cracked. 

Experimentally, I tried to open my mouth. I couldn’t. Again, a forced effort and an intense and dizzying wave of pain followed. I lay there frozen as Emma got me pain meds and an ice pack. We resorted back to communication with our thumbs via WhatsApp. It turns out Trismus is a potential complication after Wisdom Tooth Extraction, resulting in limited jaw movement around the surgical site. Not everyone gets it, but of course, I bloody had. It usually shows up around day 2 or 3 for most, and perhaps it had begun to emerge but was lost in the shuffle with everything else going on. Clearly, it was not aided by several days of bed rest and limited movement for fear of applying pressure to the right side of my face. I continued to struggle with this for another few days, gently massaging my jaw and neck back to life and trying to coax some kind of movement out of it. Hot water was my friend.

There is always, always a silver lining in life, no matter how dire your circumstances are. I found it here in the inadvertent detox I had undergone. I was mostly a sober man these days anyway, as both Emma and I gave up alcohol entirely during her pregnancy with Evelyn – #TeamEffort. However, by virtue of being unable to eat or drink anything except water and soup, I had enjoyed a free detox from caffeine, alcohol, sugar, and McDonalds. The Downside is that I hadn’t actually eaten proper food in a week.

Day 7: Globus Pharyngeus

Today, for some reason, I awoke with the unrealistic hope that I’d be miraculously cured and ready to spring out of bed. Wrong. Another 5am wake up call thanks to my cursed jaw. I rolled out of bed, wincing in pain, and went for some medication, only to be met with an entirely new issue: a symptom named globus pharyngeus. This sensation felt like a persistent lump stuck in my throat, as if I had a pill lodged somewhere around my Adam’s apple. I was convinced for a good hour that the Naproxen had lodged itself there in my neck. It was deeply unpleasant and caused me to cough and choke.

To add to the fun, I have a long-standing hiatus hernia, making me prone to acid reflux if not carefully managed with a medicine called Omeprazole. The combination of these two ailments made for a particularly lovely morning. The pills had likely gone down fine, but my throat had swollen slightly, perhaps due to the intubation and the surgery itself. I could see light brown bruising now blossoming all the way from my chin down to my throat.

On top of that, I had a persistent foul taste in my mouth. The pain had returned with a fierce intensity, predominantly on the right side. I spent Friday enduring this fresh hell and lamenting the loss of an entire week of my life to this wretched condition. Yet, I resolved to focus on the hope of a brighter day ahead.

Day 8: I’m Sorry, Nerve Damage?

And unfortunately, that brighter day did not come. The pain hit a new and frustrating peak overnight. Despite taking Codeine, Paracetamol, Naproxen, and even Novocaine, none provided ultimate relief. From the early hours until around mid-afternoon, I endured excruciating spasms down my right side. My tongue had gone numb the night before and remained so upon waking. The agony reached such intensity at one point that it nearly rendered me unconscious. Once the spasms subsided, a persistent tingling covered my face. I described the pain to Emma as sharp, sudden electric shocks, spreading from my jaw to my cheek, up to my eye, and as far back as my ear. This was eight days after surgery, and three days passed when I was supposed to be fully recovered, but somehow, it was the worst pain I’d felt yet. Now I really began to worry that something was wrong.

Em called the emergency number again. A rather helpful doctor spoke with her, as I had lost my ability to talk once again. The leading theory was that the deep tooth roots being moved had disturbed the nerves in my jawline. The lingual nerve, which communicates with the tongue, likely explained the numbness. Other nerves, responsible for transmitting pain, were clearly overactive and sending machine gun fire pain messages to my brain. The most optimistic scenario was that bruising under the skin was pressing on the nerve, or that it was running through the bruise itself as painful as that sounds. The alternative, which I dreaded, was nerve damage—a condition that could take six months or more to heal, or might not heal at all. I was a little worried. The coming days would be crucial in determining which of these drastically different outcomes awaited me.

Days 9-12: Improvements

Despite my troubles, I found myself gradually improving, yet still a slave to sudden spasms of pain, both day and night, with varying degrees of intensity. The only way to manage these “attacks” was to rely on codeine and paracetamol. I didn’t like doing it. I wanted to get off the meds as soon as possible, but I valued sleep—a luxury my battered jaw refused to permit. The tip of my tongue remained numb, which, as Emma informed me, is crucial for tasting salt. Wonderful. The tingling and electric shock-like sensations persisted but were less frequent. There was a glimmer of hope. I slowly became active, attempting to return to normalcy. Of course, I then developed two large, uncomfortable mouth ulcers under my tongue.

Day 13: Yep, Nerve Damage

Today, I had my follow-up appointment at the hospital. The doctor was very reassuring and answered all my questions, but the news wasn’t what I’d hoped for. She examined my x-ray and noted the proximity of the nerve line to the root of the extracted tooth. A slight nudge in the wrong direction was all it took. I was warned before the procedure that this was a possibility, 1 in 200 experience an “altered sensation” in their lips or tongue, I just naively didn’t realise that altered sensation included pain, too. Wanting to be rid of the teeth more than the risk, I had signed accordingly, but hearing that the recovery time is around six months is disheartening. Even worse, there’s a chance it could be permanent. I sure hope not.

The doctor carried out a sensitivity test on my tongue poking and prodding it, I couldn’t feel it. This confirmed that the front of my tongue remains numb to sensation. At least the shooting pains and the tingling, buzzing feeling all up my right cheek could be explained now. She then put a sedative patch in my mouth right over the affected area, instantly it started working and gave me blessed relief.

All I had to do now was be the very definition of patient. I expressed my desire to get off the codeine, but alas it is staying as much as those 5am painful wake ups are for the foreseeable. I have mixed feelings about this. It’s good to have the teeth gone, it’s great to understand what is wrong with me and why my recovery didn’t quite go as planned but it royally stinks that the road ahead is long and painful.

TIP: Clove oil works a treat to give you some short-term relief from this. £3 for a 10ml bottle from Tesco, and you just put a little on a cotton bud and apply it to the pain. It also tastes absolutely foul and may make you want to vomit.

And now here we are, writing and publishing this journal over 2 weeks post operation. I still wake up early every morning with white hot pain down from my right ear to my chin. I still can’t taste properly, and I have a definite weakness in my jaw. I remain hopeful, though, that this isn’t permanent. It can’t be. I could do without another surgery. Hey, I wonder how Colin is getting along? Onwards from here, I suppose.

Thank you for reading. Thank you to our new blog subscribers, ‘buy me a coffee’ supporters who have spared a couple of quid generously to keep Em going, and all of the wonderful comments on our first few posts. We genuinely didn’t expect things to go so well, and are both encouraged to keep it going!

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve missed out on some precious Daddy-Daughter time.

… Onwards from here, I suppose.