I'm also in a non-inconsequential amount of pain. A week or so back, the teeth on the left side of my head started hurting ... sort of like when I was grinding my teeth. I had one of those drugstore melt-and-mold teeth guards in the cabinet for just this sort of situation, so I got set up with that (despite how it randomly triggers my gag reflex), figuring that a few days of wearing that at night would mitigate the situation. Nope.
What was confusing about this was that the pain was not localized, it could be focused on the upper molars, the lower molars, or even as far forward as the canines, just general hurt ... which corresponded with the sort of pain I'd get with the grinding. However, last night I was trying to eat some baby carrots, and when I tried crunching one on that side of my mouth (yeah, I'm stupid like that), there was a VERY localized sharp pain in one of my lower left molars.Now, I've been lucky in having "good teeth" ... I got nearly no cavities as a kid, and only had one run of a lot of them when hitting puberty (go figure). Most of these are in the lower molars on the left side of my mouth. Considering it's been 40+ years since I had those fillings done, my guess is that one or more of these has popped out or cracked or whatever would happen to create the level of pain I've been feeling. This only suggested itself today when I got some of that liquid pain killer for teeth over at Walgreens, and noticed in the mirror when I was daubing this stuff on with a q-tip that it was going on over a whole line of fillings.
What's been weird is how variable the pain has been. Some parts of the day, it's almost nothing, other parts of the day, it's nearly debilitating ... and, as noted, the focus of the pain is all over the place (maybe I popped fillings from both upper and lower teeth?). I've been hitting the painkillers quite a bit (Acetaminophen, Alleve, and even up to Vicodin), and really need to get this taken care of.
Of course, we don't have dental insurance, and we're broke ... so I spent a chunk of the day looking into Dental Clinics at the various hospitals. The Wife suggested the one down at UIC, where several folks she knows from work have had positive experiences, plus found ones at Northwestern and Illinois Masonic. Of course, the waiting times for these can be brutal (the UIC web site even warned that they can only take so many new patients), and I'm not going to be happy if I have to deal with this for another week or two. Unfortunately, even the last dentist office I went to (there was a Groupon) had no openings until next week, so I may be having to fight through the pain for a while.
I guess what I'm going to do is to contact all of the Clinics, get appointments as early as I can, go to the first one that I can get into, and then cancel the others. Not happy about this. As noted, I've been very lucky to have had very few dental issues (aside from the teeth grinding, but that's STRESS) over the decades, and I think my idea that these are 45-year-old fillings failing is probably a good bet ... which will hopefully be easily remedied by putting in new ones (and not require root canals).
In the meanwhile ... OW, OWW, OWWWW!
