[Shelley, Prometheus Unbound]
Given that I only write to record some invidious medical procedure, or to catalogue some damage to body and mind, it is auspicious that I have composed no such tales of late. No less a seer than Nelly Furtado tells us that all good things come to an end, and so it is that a new chapter of raving affliction begins.
It was a Thursday afternoon when the ache in my jaw became obtrusive. Despite the marauding rage and hatred that are my life force, I am not one to gnash or grind my teeth; hence the source of pain was likely medical. By evening it was toothache proper, and by Friday it had graduated to the stage where eating anything was an ordeal. Any joy at the consequent weight loss I might experience was punched clean away by the mocking constancy of pain.
I looked up a few emergency dentists, but then speculated at the likely price and decided to book an appointment with a regular dentist. The earliest they could see me was in two weeks. Hmm. I wondered if it would get better on its own. By the evening it was getting close to the worst pain I had ever known (and I have had some pretty obscene migraines in my time – a broken toe was heaven by compare). I phoned the emergency dentist and made an appointment for 9pm. Typically the dentist in question was situated across the road from where I work – I had thought of popping across there during the day, but was put off by the fact that it was a dental practice combined with a beauty salon. By 9pm I wouldn’t have cared if it were twinned with an abattoir, indeed I would have welcomed the distraction of being strung up and exsanguinated.
I hadn’t been for a dental check up for over two years – yes, yes, my bad. I never liked my former dentist, and his practice is in Hayes Town, which is a right slum these days (a far cry from the jovial suburb in which I was born). I knew I had a chipped filling that needed looking at, but when the emergency dentist started prodding it to see if that was the tooth in question, I was obliged to point out that it was actually the other side of my face. The problem lay in (or under) a crown that my old dentist had fitted many years ago. An x-ray revealed that he had not filled the root all the way, so over the years it had become a little pocket for bacteria, which had finally decided to emerge and say hello to the rest of my jaw. It would need a specialist to put it right, and he made an immediate referral [so immediate that two weeks on I’ve still heard nothing – not that I was looking forward to spending £550+ for something the shabby NHS could do on the cheap].
In the interim he gave me an injection in the gum to anaesthetise the pain, plus a handful of antibiotics to take now, and a prescription for some more to begin the next day.
No longer in pain, I went home feeling suddenly starving, and forced down a bowl of cereal before going to bed. Such was my relief that I abjured entertaining violent thoughts towards my former dentist. The last time I saw him I did remark that I had occasional pain in the area of my crowned tooth. He took an x-ray (for which he provocatively charged me as a private patient, despite being a nominal NHS dentist). He advised that the x-ray showed nothing amiss – curious then that a similar x-ray two years later effortlessly exposed his substandard workmanship. I recall that surgeons in ancient Egypt faced death if their patients died on them: what torment should a negligent dentist endure?
I can tell you that the anaesthetic wore off at 2am Saturday morning, when I awoke in some new pit of agony. Dante perhaps was right, that there is no greater sorrow than the remembrance of former joys in present (and everlasting) misery; I would add that there are few torments more atrocious than the recurrence of a torment formerly overcome (I know, I have watched the Matrix trilogy). Dante put those words in the mouth of Francesca da Rimini, damned to the black whirlwinds of the second circle of Hell for adultery with her brother-in-law (damned alongside her, but too busy weeping to add anything to his beloved’s tale). For the sake of justice I am happy to report that their murderer was earmarked for the ninth circle of Hell, where Dante condemned traitors (by ‘virtue’ of killing his brother and his wife, he was guilty of treason to his kin). I make this learned digression simply to mention that those damned to this first zone of the last circle of Hell were encased to the neck in ice (Dante found that nine circles, albeit subdivided in some cases, were sufficient to house the sum total of the damned; Dante was of course writing some 600 years before Val Lehman). The lovely poet goes on to tells us that some of the ice-encased damned were so cold that their ears had fallen off (lack of circulation, I expect), and that the chattering of frozen teeth made music like the song of the stork. I am guessing from the lack of odes to its beauty that stork-song is not noted for its plangent grace, and that the sound was therefore displeasing to Dante’s ears (in which case those with no remaining ears should have counted their blessings). But I am now talking utter bollocks. What I was trying to say was that even those frozen from the neck down in Dante’s Hell, whose ears had been seared off by frostbite, remained conspicuous by their chattering teeth. Thus, with all physical sensation chilled from my body, would I still be able to feel this fucking pain in my jaw.
I still tried, however, with an impromptu ice pack clamped to my mouth, but when the melting ice began to trickle down my neck I thought, ‘Bollocks to this,’ and sought an alternative. Happily I could remember where I last saw my pliers (for some reason that my subconscious has yet to define, they sit more or less permanently on my cherished box set of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas). Grabbing them, I stormed to the bathroom like one possessed, glared scathingly in the mirror, opened wide, and without even rinsing the pliers I proceeded to apply them to the offending crown. I had calculated neither the strength nor time required to wrench out a tooth (least of all an artificial one); all I knew was that the pain would be a blessing to what now I suffered. Sadly the clatter of metal against enamel grated on me somewhat, and after a few angry tugs I gave up and stormed to the kitchen. In the (lovely new) fridge were the dregs of a cocktail I’d made the other day: equal measures (i.e. lots) of tequila and white rum, steeped for days with one whole lemon (quartered). Ordinarily a most uplifting tincture – but would it rise to the demand of clarifying consciousness into oblivion?
I have never been one to seek oblivion through alcohol – far too clichéd, and also lazily redundant given the other options so easily at hand. I poured the cocktail into a glass, reached for my bedside bottle of temazepam, and shook two pills into my hand. Under normal circumstances half a tablet is quite capable of easing me to sleep. Under these extraordinary circumstances four times that quantity was the least I’d need. I necked the pills; I necked the tequila and rum. I went to bed. The absence of further memories of tortured struggle indicates that I fell asleep quite soon, although I awoke before 9am in much the same pain.
I wonder that, despite the opulent vocabulary that ever enriches my melancholia, I am stumped when it comes to an adequate description of dental pain. An ache is by definition a dull pain; an ache can be tolerated. The term toothache is therefore either a self-deprecating understatement, or (like headache) an ignorant slight. A person does not carve glass into his arm to distract himself from a simple ache.
I rose, showered, dressed, and stamped to the nearest pharmacy to collect my prescription. 1.5 grams of amoxicillin for 7 days… wondering if I could match it with equal measures of temazepam, I spent the day largely immobile on the sofa. I needed to conserve my strength, as that evening I was going out to dinner with Susan, Michael, Julie and Jason. It was a double celebration, for Susan’s Marathon efforts and Jason’s forthcoming birthday, so I did not want to miss it. I figured I’d be pissed off if someone cancelled on me because of toothache, so I soldiered over to Susan’s, only just getting there in time for the cab. I had told Susan the day before that I was feeling crook, and clearly I now looked it, as she asked if I wanted to go home. I feebly insisted that I’d be okay, and that something to eat would do me good; I did however add that I probably wouldn’t want to go on anywhere else after the meal (save perhaps a morgue).
We arrived at Brown’s of Windsor, which not surprisingly for a Saturday evening was heaving. As we waded through the throng to the bar, I began to feel suffocated. What was worse: the unceasing chatter of traitors’ teeth, or the deafening clamour of small talk in a jam-packed bar?
By the time I had a long glass of G&T in my hand I was positively feverish. I dashed to the toilet, convinced I was going to throw up, but after a splash of cold water to the face I returned to my gin. As a measure of how ill I was, I sipped my drink slowly – normally my first gin is down my neck in two minutes. Julie commented on how pale I looked, and felt my brow (motherhood had made her good at such things), and both she and Susan asked if I wanted to go home. I don’t think they’d have minded at all if I did, but I again insisted that I wanted to eat something. However for my next drink I chose coke (with no vodka – can you imagine?), and when we got to our table I was happy with water.
It would actually have been a great evening if I hadn’t been racked with agony. I say ‘great evening’, inasmuch as it being memorable for its mishaps: Michael and Jason’s starters were cold, so they sent them back, only to find the kitchen had run out (I think they had mussels), so would they like to choose another? By the time they got their second choice the rest of us had more or less finished ours. Then our main meals came – except Jason’s. The waitress apologetically advised that they had also run out of whatever it was he’d ordered. He was understandably fractious, pointing out that they’d been happy to take his order, and had only advised that it was unavailable once they’d already brought everyone else’s meals. Smooth-tongued Michael convinced the waitress that we’d be more inclined to acquiesce if they got us another bottle of his favourite red (@ £37) on the house. Jason then received his second choice – steak – so quickly that it must have been already cooked and waiting. Julie also had steak, and hers looked so pink and tender that I’d have killed to be able to sink my teeth into it. However my teeth were in no position to sink into anything – I had the fish and chips, which was very good (and came complete with a pot of puréed peas (mushy peas to anyone else)). Eating did me good, and I managed ice cream too, but eventually the mechanism of jaw action took its toll, and by the end of the evening my tooth was killing me. We then had the fun of the bill - they had indeed given us the second bottle of red for free, plus Michael and Jason's starters, but we also insisted that they take off the price of Jason’s main meal too, which they did. So in effect we had two starters, a main meal and an expensive wine for nothing. Even this victory could barely raise my spirits, and I’m usually the sort of person who gloats to distraction if given five pence more change than was owed.
Susan and Michael did not want to go home yet; I on the other hand could be as unsociable as I liked. We had already booked (and more importantly paid for) a return cab to Uxbridge, so I said my goodbyes and made use of it. I went straight to bed when I got home. It wasn’t cold, but I was shivering (even at the time my spasmodic trembles struck me as comical). I then slept, only to wake feeling roasting hot. So passed the next eighteen hours, alternately cold and hot and feverish. Deeply unpleasant though it was, the fever did signal a turning point, as the pain was definitely lessening – had the antibiotics deigned to do something at last? Or maybe, I told myself, the infection had rotted through the nerve in my jaw, and I could no longer register the true calibre of my sufferings. As if to bear out my speculation, not only did my bottom lip feel cold and numb, but I noticed on Sunday evening (when I had attained a sufficient level of consciousness to gaze in a mirror) that my jaw had swollen up, hamster-style. Shrugging, I conceded that permanent facial disfigurement was no big deal if the pain had abated.
I managed to watch telly for a bit before returning to bed. I think that day I can’t have been awake more than 4 hours. By Monday morning I was still a tad feverish, but relatively pain-free. I found that if I stayed immobile I was perfectly equable; any protracted movement did induce dizziness and nausea, so I confined myself to my sick chamber for three days. A diet of Kate Bush and Chopin possibly threatened to elevate my fever into an elysian delirium, so I also watched old episodes of House in order to ground myself a little. With great fortitude I managed not to self-diagnose lupus or cerebral malaria; I didn’t even crave some of the esteemed doctor’s Vicodin.
Contrary to the words of the poet, fever is not in fact “a lovely way to burn”. When applied metaphorically, fever is taken as a state of intense, restless passion. Am I to believe that such imagery is entirely fallacious? When applied literally, fever is a state of feeling like shit 24/7, of having to go back to bed after the mammoth excursion of a walk to the shops, of sterile, mocking debility. So yes, the notion of fever as a state of nervous excitement is more than a little out of touch.
One upside to fever (besides the opportunity it gives me to elaborate on new depths of lassitude) is its rapacious infection of dream sleep. True, high doses of temazepam can also cause ‘vivid dreams’, but with a ten-year habit under my belt I am long since impervious to any such side effects. Suffice to say that my febrile nights have given rise to some of the bizarrest dreams of my life. Only last night I saw Patsy Palmer in a nightclub (I can report that she is a lot taller, and much better looking, in ‘real’ life). In another dream I was minding my own business doing the dishes when a host of people suddenly stepped out from a theatre somehow adjoining the kitchen (how very Jamie and the Magic Torch). I was hastily taken to one side, instructed to behave, and introduced to some vile WI-style hoity-toity harridans. Several of them seized upon the monstrous truth that I had longer nails than theirs. “I don’t like men with fingernails,” one protested, as though my very presence threatened to implode her universe. I was about to comment on her patently false and over-varnished nails, when another lady declared that the name Simon was very plain, and demanded to know what was my preferred boy’s name. I raised my eyebrows and answered, “Ba’al.” This led to something of a clamour, and a freakishly tall, half-baked woman tottered forwards. She was wearing a sandwich-board emblazoned with a slogan to the effect that Ba’al was responsible for Attila’s “ninja hordes” marauding Europe. I was about to point out that her conflation of all pagan peoples into one spurious enemy was insufferably stupid, when consciousness struck, and dispelled the sorry scene.
In yet another outpouring of my heat-oppressed brain, I found myself re-reading Crime and Punishment, only to get half way through and realise that he still hadn’t killed anyone. Instead, the book was about my own concern at finding a suitable bookcase. Hmm. Crime and Punishment is central to my psychological development, so its appearance in a dream gives me free rein to engage in reprehensibly overwrought speculation. Not only was the book my introduction to Dostoyevsky; I also began reading it at 3am one morning while under the then novel thrall of Prozac-fuelled insomnia. By the early hours I had reached page 100, and grew alarmingly suspicious that Raskolnikov’s restless, obsessive neurosis was a mirror of my own. I put down the book, and it took two years to rouse the courage to read any more. During that period I did not murder once, let alone twice, so I am able to conclude that any similarity between me and Dostoyevsky’s protagonist was purely incidental.
When Caligula finally awoke from a near-fatal fever in the first year of his reign as third Emperor of Rome, it is said by some commentators that he awoke minus his sanity, and so began the more colourful period of his empery. When the worst of my fever was over, it could be commented that I became equally injudicious, insofar as I returned to work on the Thursday (i.e. one week on from the infection flaring up). I finished the antibiotics the following day, and still felt a tad crappy (although the pain and swelling were a lot better). Over the weekend I began feeling even more tired and listless than usual, sleeping for ten hours at a time and feeling once more headachy and feverish upon waking. On Sunday I began to find it painful to urinate (surely the amoxicillin would have cleared up any lingering syphilis?). On Monday it was worse, but it wasn't till the afternoon (by which time I needed to go about every ten minutes) that I noticed that the burning pain on urination was colourfully illustrated by the presence of blood and pus: one would have been sufficient; both made me feel greedy. Once upon a time the sight of my own sweet blood was a balm to my anxiety; now it proved remarkably less encouraging.
I phoned NHS Direct, who were surprisingly helpful and said I had all the signs of a urinary tract infection (what a relief – I thought I might have been menstruating). The nurse recommended that I see my GP asap; of course I had already tried my GP, only to be told the earliest ‘urgent’ appointment was on Friday (i.e. 4 days hence). I refrained from insisting that pissing blood might not necessarily wait till then – not so much from gentlemanly decorum as the likelihood of such a statement cutting no ice with the care professional to whom I was speaking.
The NHS Direct nurse had asked if I had pains in the side/lower back, which would indicate that the infection had contaminated my kidneys. I reported that I had no such pain (the malaise of tedium vitae is a less localised ache). No prizes for guessing that within half an hour I had aches down my back, below my ribs, and round the pelvis. I was also getting shaky and feverish, and so rather than waiting four days for an urgent appointment I took myself to A&E.
Aside from the obligatory Vicky Pollard mother and daughter, it was actually a painless experience – they have tarted up the A&E unit at Hillingdon Hospital, complete with fake palm trees (all that was missing was a water feature, which in my condition would have been quite unfortunate). Ever the consummate administrator, I furnished the hospital receptionist with a sheet of paper listing the obligatory next of kin, address of GP, recent drug use etc. She was taken aback and asked whence I had got such a document – from my GP perhaps? I would have laughed derisively, but a frown had to suffice. Clearly patients with a modicum of common sense were intruders here.
I was seen within the hour. I had been troubled that my urine was no longer blushing with blood and pus (maybe the bacteria had burnt it all up?); my fears were swiftly allayed when the effervescent sample I provided revealed "a very strong bladder infection". I was packed off with 5 days of strong antibiotics (or rather antibacterials, not that I care for such pedantry), and the advice that if I had indeed waited till Friday it would most likely have enveloped my kidneys. Happy days.
As euphemisms go, ‘water infection’ is audaciously namby-pamby: the very word water effectively dilutes the real issue. Discussion of genitourinary disease is of course fraught with peril in our repressed and prudish milieu, which probably goes someway towards explaining why I drew such happiness from telling anyone who would listen that I was pissing blood and pus. It did occur to me that some might unkindly ascribe my ailment to amorous misadventures – but who am I to tear down another’s fantasies?
This does lead me to ponder what then is the true source of my malady. The A&E medic was concerned solely with diagnosing and treating the cause of my bloody piss. How I contracted such a sudden infection was neither here nor there. I would think it unlikely that a dental infection would scamper down to my bladder; at any rate, would it not lay waste (no pun intended) to anything en route?
So here I am again confined to sickbay. I now have the alternately rapturous and funereal (but always deafening) splendours of Wagner to medicate my mind. Parsifal was an inspired choice, given that the character of Amfortas sings a most splendid (eight-minute) lament on the chronic agonies of his (spear-inflicted) wound. Indeed he tells us that there can be no cessation to his pain, for the fevered blood of sin is ever renewed from the fount of longing. It was precisely such pseudo-theological mumbo jumbo that led the inestimable Nietzsche to break rank with his former hero Wagner.
