DIY dentistry
A couple of weeks before my 21st birthday, I started getting a dull ache in my jaw - I dismissed it as my wisdom teeth settling in and thought nothing more of it, despite the pain getting steadily worse. I was in the midst of planning the mother of all piss ups and nothing was going to stand in my way.

About a week before the big day, I noticed that the area around one of my wisdom teeth was a bit red and swollen. I did what any self-respecting man does, and gave it a good poke.

As any self-respecting man knows, you should never give it a good poke.

Erm, the nicest way I can put this is that it sort of... burst. I'm not really sure what I thought I was going to achieve by poking it, but I'm pretty certain that it wasn't the sensation and image in the mirror of my tongue lolling about on a sea of pus like someone sitting in a bath of custard for Children in Need.

The next 15 mins was spent intermittently vomiting then vigorously scrubbing and re-scrubbing my teeth to get the taste out my mouth. Imagine Barrymore trying to clean his poolside before the cops came and you're getting there. I went to the dentist and he explained that I had a fairly large infection under the tooth, and gave me antibiotics. Unfortunately the one he gave me was metronidazole, which was about to shit all over my birthday. See, this stuff doesn't go well with alcohol. At all. It reacts with booze in kinda the same way as the drug they treat alcoholism with, so when you drink you get nausea, vomiting, racing pulse, flushes etc (but without the pleasure of actually being riotously pissed in between). So I decided to take matters into my own hands.

At the time, I was working in a lab where we regularly used a lot of sterile needles and syringes so I swiped a few and nabbed a bit of neat alcohol too.

I'm not quite sure what the cleaner thought when she saw me injecting pure ethanol into my gums, or what she made of my panicked "please don't tell the boss - I'm not mainlining booze, I'm not a tramp, let me prove it to you" explanation by squeezing my gum at her, which by now looked like a small apple wearing a tooth for a hat. The upshot is that as a result of shooting ethanol into my gum, the infection cleared in a day or two and I never needed the antibiotics, and with a mouth that no longer resembled a whore's fanny, I got pissed as a lord on my 21st! Yay!



Unfortunately Xmas and new year were fucked as the infection came back a couple of weeks later leading to two of my wisdom teeth being pulled the week before Xmas, and the other two being done a week later just in time for new year. Fuckhammers.
(Rushy, Thu 20 Jan 2011, 21:05, 1 reply)

"like a small apple wearing a tooth for a hat"
has just made me laugh tea out of my nose.
also, boo to metronidazole! that stuff made me puke my guts up when i had an irish coffee after a meal :(
( Smash Monkey lowering the tone of the whole internet, Thu 20 Jan 2011, 21:10, closed)