Coming back to life, I hope…

 

Well, I think I’m finally coming back to the world after a nightmare illness of nearly 10 days.  Never in a million years would I guess an infection under my tooth could cause such excruciating and agonizing pain.  Seriously, that was the worst pain I’ve ever been in in my entire life, to a degree of not sleeping for about four nights and moaning or crying literally almost that entire time.  I think the worst part of that was that the pain medicine did literally nothing, or maybe such a little something that it wasn’t even worth the side effects it had…maybe it would go from a 10 to 9.2 or something.  Keep in mind, I had dry sockets after my wisdom teeth were pulled (in all four teeth—something the dentist said he’d never seen in 30 years of dentistry), and that was a pleasant experience compared to this stupid little infection.

I was relieved to find some online forums (actually this was my dear husband trying to find some home remedy) with other people suffering this same intense unrelenting pain, and was actually relieved to see comments like “I was shot in the knee, and I would much rather be shot again than go through this pain again.” or “I had six babies with no anesthetics and that was nothing compared to this.”  Hundreds and hundreds of comments like this.  So at least I knew I didn’t suddenly have the weakest tolerance to pain ever known to man.

Yet, what would an illness be here without some type of ‘Swedish’ experience to go along with it?  Naturally, I got this infection over the weekend, so I had two choices for emergency dentists on a Sunday, neither of which have raving reviews by any stretch.  But, desperation, you know… So, we went and I should also mention that socialized medicine does not include anything dental, so I spent 500kr ($76) to be told there was nothing wrong and to be asked the one, always asked, medical superlative question that surely solves all medical issues: “have you been stressed?”  Like, seriously???  I’m in the worst pain I can even imagine…this can NOT possibly be stress related…that is not the root of every ailment. 

So, I left with even more stress than I went in with, along with a muscle relaxer.  And we found yet another dentist the next day that was able to see me, and he found, without any trouble and with a lot of shock it was missed the previous night, an infection. 

That’s just a short recap.  The antibiotic took 48 hours to even start making a difference, and from that point on, it’s been very slow progress, to a point I have to reassure myself that the tiniest steps are indeed signs of progress.  Like, I wasn’t able to do a load of laundry yesterday, so doing that one tiny task in a day of laying in bed means I must be improving.  I don’t know.  I have another appointment tomorrow, and I’m pretty sure I need more antibiotics and this isn’t entirely gone.  And although I’m pretty frustrated about spending the last nearly 10 days and bed and becoming far too acquainted with the Swedish daytime tv programming, I still have to say I’m not in that kind of pain anymore. 

In other news… well, now that I think about it, I can’t think of other news.  I’ve been in such a torturous haze lately that I didn’t even know what day of the week it was for several days.  I guess in other news, I was really wrong when I thought winter might be ending early this year.  Nope.  After a few days of reprieve, it decided to make a spectacular encore appearance.  We’re back to well below 0 days and icy sidewalks and falling snow.  On a side note, I think it is the dumbest thing in the world that they don’t shovel, or require shoveling, anywhere.  They pride themselves on societally doing so many things to avoid unnecessary medical expenses, like avoiding stress (ha, yeah I know this one!) or having constant driving studies and implementing all types of strategies, in turn having the safest driving in the world; yet they miss the most obvious.  I don’t care if I’m a foreigner and “haven’t learned to walk on ice.”  It is the freaking scariest thing to try and get around out there.  People are falling and breaking limbs and the hospitals are flooded with patients.  Seriously, this is Sweden.  It gets cold.  It snows.  People walk everywhere.  hmmmmm, what could you possibly do to avoid unnecessary governmental medical spending?  Hmmmm, let’s think about this for a moment, shall we?

Yeah, I’m clearly quite irritable lately.  Blame it on the medicine, the pain, the general stress I’m under with where we will live in four and half months (I mean, she kinda had a point about the stress thing actually), or the winter.  It’s alright because I’m trying really hard to keep in mind THAILAND!!  Yep, that’s right.  In other news, we are going to Thailand.  That’s if I don’t fall and break my leg first