Agonizing pain on day 6
Tuesday of last week, I had an extraction of an impacted wisdom tooth and an abscessed second moral. I also had a bone graft done to help with maintaining bone structure. Well, they said day 4 would be the worst and that things would probably improve rapidly discomfort wise after that.. here I am going into day 6, and I must say that this non-stop pain is wearing me down. I can now eat basically normally, I can open my jaw, all of that is back.... it is just the pain at the extraction site that is driving me insane. To clarify: The initial pain on the first 3 days after extraction was more of a soreness around the whole jaw and side of the face.. and sure it was gritty.. but from day 4 to now, it gave way to a very intense localized pain at the extraction site. Hard to describe what it feel like...but if I had to I would say it feels like someone ripped and peeled the skin back in your gum, poured acid and salt on it, and then for good measure cut it up with a scalpel and then threaded a tiny piece of rope through pulling everything tight together to add pressure on top of the pain ( that part is due to the stitching)
I was prescribed hydrocodone which I don't want to take... my experience is that it just makes me sleep. And since I have sleep apnea and live alone, I don't feel safe with it because being that sedated, I can't control whether or not I roll onto my back and trigger the apnea.
Ibuprofen actually gives me near perfect relief but I have been taking 4 pills a day for the first 5 days and it is now making me nauseas and dizzy which tells me it is starting to do damage to my stomach lining. I swapped it out for Tylenol, which also gave relief... but to my horror the second dose of Tylenol only provided relief for less than half the time of the first dose and so I've been sitting here in absolute pain for the last 5 hours with no medication to help with it.
I am going to call the oral surgeons practice when they open at 8 and see if this is normal or what. I will say that I do have a piece of skin that seems to of come loose but I can't imagine I have infection as I am on amoxicillin and have also been using salt rinse and otherwise keeping my mouth clean.
I can only imagine that I went a little too " hard in the paint " on day 2 and did too much activity as I honestly wasn't feeling bad at all in the first 3 days... now I am in such pain that I can't concentrate on anything hardly, and it's just intolerable. Waiting for 6 am. to take another dose of Tylenol and pray that it buys me some sleep and that I wake up feeling somewhat better... But something tells me this grind is going to continue.