Pain Hurts

Once upon a time, when I was a little girl, I used to get sick at Christmastime.

It was as regular as clockwork. One year it was pneumonia. One year it was pneumonia with a chickenpox chaser (caught from another kid in the hospital with pneumonia). A few years in a row it was bronchitis bad enough to land me first in bed, then the ER.

I gradually toughened up, with the help of gamma globulin shots and more exposure to other kids. By the time I was in college, I was down to about two colds a year, and grateful for that. My only Christmastime ailment was the malaise caused by listening to the seasonal Parental Fight, which I guess was their version of the Christmas Illness Syndrome. But that's material for another blog post. (When I first saw the Seinfeld "Festivus" episode and heard about the ritual Airing of Grievances, I thought about the Parental Fight, and told my friends, "Well, I guess we already celebrate Festivus at our house." Come to think of it, I suppose it was a Feat of Strength that I didn't just turn around, walk out the door and spend Christmas somewhere else. Or maybe that was a Feat of Stupidity. But, again, another post for another day.)

Anyway...after being relatively hale and hearty for 30 years or so, I have again succumbed to illness. I have come down with some sort of chronic sinus-and-surrounds congestion that's manifesting as incredible pain around my jaw. It waxes and wanes -- two nights ago I couldn't sleep at all; last night, properly dosed with Sudafed PE I was finally able to catch some Z's. But I'll be doing fairly well, with maybe just a dull, brain-freeze-achy ache on one side of my face, when suddenly a stabbing pain will shoot up into my cheekbone, down into my palate, down into the deeply filled molar I call my "weather molar" because it's touchy that way -- it's so bad I literally see stars. On a pain scale of 1 (my dog accidently hooking me with one of his remaining teeth) to 10 (the GYN biopsy I had once, where they very nearly had to pry me off the ceiling), it's about an 8.5. Sound even aggravates it.

Thinking that perhaps my weather tooth had finally started to deteriorate, and anticipating, with some dread, the unwelcome gift of a root canal this Christmas, I finagled a same-day appointment with my dentist, who X-rayed my teeth from all angles, whapped them with a mallet, checked my bite...and pronounced everything fine. "I'm betting it's your sinuses," he said. "People come in here all the time with toothaches, and that's what it turns out to be."

So now I'm trying to get an appointment with my doc. The office is closed. I'm sucking down Sudafed sinus-headache meds according to the recommended dosage, which make a marginal difference -- instead of feeling like a truck is running over my jaw, backing up and running over it again, now it feels maybe like a mountain bike is doing that. I'm also thinking about how I'm going to get my baking done if I feel like crap this weekend, and anticipating my mother's increasing anxiety at my plight -- which itself seems to contribute to the intensity of the pain. I worry that it might be something worse; or I worry that it might be some previously unnoticed residual injury from the involuntary triple axel I performed in the icy office parking lot the other week before the maintenance guys had come around with their salt buckets. I get whiny.

During my dark night of the atomic jaw ache, when I was just sitting up in bed unable to do anything else, I found myself praying for all the other people in the world having their own 2 a.m. medical and other crises, much worse than mine. It felt like the only useful thing I could do in the circumstances. Today -- well, I just feel sorry for myself. I feel sorry that I woke up with no pain, and thought, "Oh, thank God that's over with!", and then five minutes later as I was puttering around the house it all came back.

Pain hurts. I hate it.