So, according to my best guess based on symptoms and history, I probably have some sort of infection or cavitation in my jawbone.
I'm not considering surgery anytime soon, but am trying more holostic approaches. I think it's possible the body can heal this itself. We'll see if I can be successful.
History: two teeth in the upper right side of my mouth got super deep cavities in them due to years of being too sick to brush my teeth and unable to see dentists. The teeth were mildly abscessed on an x-ray. The dentist said normally they'd do root canals, but we could try to save them if I wished. So we tried. He did large fillings on them,
directly against the nerve. The dentist did not include any barrier between the tooth nerve and the filling, as is usually done, because Clifford Reactivity Testing showed my body reacted to that material.
What we now know is that these fillings, particularly with no barrier, allowed bacteria to enter those two teeth over the course of the next two years. The jawbone above the teeth, all the way up to beside my nose, was painful if I pressed on it. Unwilling to return to the bad dentist, I spent a year trying to find a dentist that takes medicaid that would also accommodate my sever MCS. All dentists I could find either refused to treat me our of concern for the increased risk, or insisted on treating me without any accommodations.
Then what looked like a chronic pimple over the tooth got HUGE, at least from my perspective. It freaked me out! I was given antibiotics, and it would go down, but resurfaced whenever antibiotics stopped. After over a decade of no antibiotics (they contributed to me becoming severe in the first place), I was given 3 rounds of it. By this time my gums were oozing pus. Still, emergency dental care eluded me. I was genuinely on the verge of attempting to pull the teeth myself at home. Eventually I went into massive credit card debt to save my own life, and got the teeth pulled by paying out of pocket at a place capable of accommodating my MCS.
That happened in I think April of this year. I got a very nice bump in my functionality as soon as my body recovered from the procedure, which I blogged about
here.
This improvement has held. And it made it possible for me to hold down a part-time job for the first time in my life.
Now, I was mostly bedridden LONG before these cavities even started, let alone got severe enough to create an abscess. I know for a fact they aren't what made me sick. But, they were a factor in *keeping* me sick, or at least as sick as I was.
Why do I suspect I now have some sort of infection or cavitation in the jawbone? Because I have hard, growing, whitish pimple-like bumps in the gumline above where those two teeth were extracted. I feel immense pressure in the area, not just in the gum but on that entire side of my face, sometimes all the way up to my eye. It often gives me headaches. That side of my sinuses is constantly stuffy, and whenever I focus on sending energy to my jaw I get a lot of sinus drainage on that side. One of the pimple-like bumps is exactly where the pus was coming out before the teeth were extracted. A third one appeared last week in the same area.
The dentist insists it's nothing to worry about because my teeth are okay. She doesn't have an explanation for the symptoms. And I'm here thinking, if I got such a significant bump in functionality from removing the abscessed teeth, what improvement is possible if I get this taken care of??
Like I said, I'm starting with more holistic approaches to find out what's possible. So far I'm doing:
- Meditation techniques to send healing to the area.
- Work on correcting the habit of tensing my face inwards (weird, but it's the only way I can describe it). If I relax my face, it feels like I'm emotionally falling apart. This is a lifelong habit that I suspect interferes with my body's self-healing mechanisms there.
- Heat on the area. Increase bloodflow and ease fluid drainage and all that.
- Osteopathic treatment (coming up!) to ensure the primary respiratory mechanism is able to reach that area and also that lymph drainage is not impeded
I know "conventional cavitation wisdom" says that the only solution is surgery. Maybe that's true, but I'm not fully convinced. The DO who got me out of a bedridden state says bones aren't actually solid structure, and they can do a lot more than we think they can. There's a more to it than that but it's the best I can summarize.
Just adding more anecdotal experience to the pile.
