Ok, so that title isn’t exactly literal. But it gets my point across pretty clearly: My braces has caused me so much pain in the past few days that I actually think being beat up wouldn’t have hurt this bad.
Let me explain the back story. So basically, Tuesday I went to my orthodontist to get my top braces adjusted, and my bottom ones placed on. I didn’t really think of it as a big deal since I had already gotten my top braces and it wasn’t so bad.
I was wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong.
About an hour after they put my bottom braces, I was in a meeting at work and I began to feel pain. They told me that some pain is normal, so I shrug it off. Then about two hours later I was so in so much pain I had to stop what I was doing and hold my jaw because it hurt so bad.
Now by this point I had already taken pain medications such as: tylenol 2, and tylenol 3. If you don’t know what those are, those are the heavy duty pain killers that you can only get prescribed. So I managed to get through work and when I got home I called the orthodontist’s emergency number.
When they called me back about 4 hours later, I tried to explain to them that I was in horrible pain. That it didn’t even hurt this bad when I got my wisdom teeth out two years ago. They brushed me off and said ‘Pain is normal’ and basically hung up on me.
So today I wake up and I’m like ‘hey it doesn’t hurt that bad’, then about ten minutes later I’m downstairs taking a tylenol 3. Which was a horrible idea considering at work today I had WHMIS training. For those of you who knows what WHMIS is, you can guess why you shouldn’t mix drugs that make you drowsy and WHMIS in the same sitting.
Needless to say, it felt like my entire body was in sleep mode, yet I was still awake. It was hard to freaking BREATH because it felt like I was taking the shallow breaths I would when I was sleeping.
After the longest and most tiring two hours of my life, I talked to my supervisor and I left work. Yes. I left work because my mouth was hurting from my braces. That’s how bad it was.
Then after I leave work my dad and I go down the orthodontist office and we decide that we are not going to leave until I see someone. I mean like, I had to leave WORK because of this. So we go in and I walk up to the receptionist and start explaining. I knew about 5 seconds into talking to her, she wanted to brush me off and send me home.
My dad pushed her, and she conceded because she probably didn’t want us to make a scene. Then about 3 explanations later, the orthodontist tells me that I have really sensitive teeth. He explains how most people are ok with the wire they put, but every once in a while they get someone who is REALLY sensitive.
I had to learn my teeth are sensitive by experiencing two days of excruciating pain. How lovely.
Anyways, so they put in a thinner wire (one that they usually use for people with gum disease) that has relieved some of the pressure, and now the pain feels normal.
This whole ordeal has taught me the importance of being assertive. Because I am one of those people who usually walks into stuff or falls down, and gets back up like nothing happened. I have a HIGH pain tolerance (as I have been told repeatedly by doctors), so complaining about pain was not something I was used to. In fact, I sort of hate complaining about pain because I don’t want to seem like a drama queen.
So when I was complaining about this pain I sort of felt really, really dumb. Which is probably why I let them brush me off on the phone the first time.
But the most frustrating thing of all of this (besides the pain), is the fact that they blew me off like I was just whining. When I have to take heavy duty prescription pills to get MOST of the pain to disappear, I am not whining, I am in PAIN.
Moral of this story: Trust your gut, and don’t let others convince you that you’re wrong. SPEAK UP AND BE ASSERTIVE!
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