Painful Lesson Learned

The saga with my face, and jaw, and mouth continues.  I wasn't getting any better with the steroids my doctor prescribed, and as I sat in a long business meeting last week, one of the women noticed I was struggling. I gave her the brief explanation of what was happening and she gasped with recognition.  She had experienced the same pain last year and wound up with broken teeth- she suggested I see my dentist.
When I woke up the next morning with yet another debilitating headache and horrendous pain in my face, I called my beloved dentist.  She was able to see me before the weekend.  She took x-rays and examined my mouth closely and then told me she had bad news:
I needed a root canal and had an abscess.  As she looked back and forth between my face and the black and white outline of the inside of my head she shook her head.  'Heather, having an abscess is horrible pain.  Living with chronic pain like this, even just for a couple of weeks, can cause depression and really mess you up!'
I began to cry. Her affirmation of my pain and the struggle it was beginning to create for me emotionally was comforting.  I had felt dismissed by my doctor and had left his office in horrendous pain but yet feeling like a baby.  She concluded that I needed antibiotics and pain medication.  My next stop would be to see the endodontist to retreat the tooth that is so horribly infected.

Once I began to think of the problem as dental instead of purely stress related, I had prepared myself for her news of a needed root canal. I had been told more than 8 years ago when I was pregnant with my third child that that tooth needed to be retreated.  It was a tooth that had already been treated through a root canal, and it had been crowned. I chose to wait for treatment.  I wasn't in any pain at the time, I was pregnant with my third child, still nursing my second child, and didn't want to take the time, spend the money, or have to worry about healing.  I put it off. Life kept happening and I never quite got to it.  In the years since, I've had dentists tell me it needed to be done- my current dentist has told me within the last five years that I need to do it, but I didn't want to spend the money, and I wasn't in pain, and so I never made time.
Putting it off brought me to today.  I am paying for my procrastination with copious amounts of pain, and now a hefty sum of money.

I went through the weekend but by Sunday, the pain hadn't lessened by much and I was starting to swell.  I called my dentist who told me that none of that was normal and I needed to head in to the ER.  In the ER, I was given more pain medication to prepare myself for the doctor to slice open the huge pocket of infection that was now bulging into my mouth and drain it.  She told me the relief would be great, but the actual draining was, in her words, 'going to be awful'.  I got through the lancing of the gums, and my friend drove me home to rest.  I now await my appointment to be evaluated by the endodontist on Friday and then the root canal through the crown sometime next week.  The receptionist called me earlier this week to let me know that my insurance won't cover one cent of the procedure.
Putting it off has cost me dearly in so many ways.
I could take time to write here about how putting off self care is never a good idea, and can wind up costing you more than just a bit of inconvenience.  However, I'm sure you get my point.  I'm learning more and more as I move through life as a single mother just how important it is to make time to take care of me.  I don't have much time or money to do much, but I'm learning that the better I feel, the stronger I am- in every way, from physical to emotional… the better mother I can be.
One of my dearest friends has two busy teenage daughters but she works intentionally to take good care of herself- she's aware that her girls are watching, and they will absorb far more by watching than by hearing.  She looks wonderful and creates time each day to care for herself. She nourishes her body and her heart and sees the incredible value in it.  She's a giving, generous, loving, happy, and beautiful woman.  The time she makes to care for herself spills over into others as she's better able to love well and give wholeheartedly.

I'm still learning. It's so easy for women to nurture others often at the expense of ourselves, but in doing that we deplete ourselves of the pure, and strong care we could be offering.  I have far to go, but I don't want to relearn this lesson in another hard, expensive way.  I get the message and will be more proactive in the future.