Muscle Relaxants & Other Recreational Drugs

I went to an oral surgeon recently because my dentist wanted to rule out cancerous tumors as a reason for my weird jaw and TMJ.

Let's just take a moment right now to reflect on how alarmist some doctors can be. In lots of cases, this can actually turn out to be a good thing. In this case, I think it was just a silly thing. Here's how my conversation went with my dentist:

Me: "My jaw really pulls to one side, it even pulls this joint out. Look."

Him: "Mm. I can recommend an oral surgeon to take a look at that."

Me: "What? I thought maybe you could give me a new bite block or something. Why do I need to go see an oral surgeon?"

Him: "Just to rule out that it's nothing else causing the TMJ."

Me: "Do you send all patients with TMJ to an oral surgeon?"

Him: "No."

Me: "So....by 'something else' do you mean, like, a tumor?"

Him: "Well... [avoids eye contact, looks anxiously at lap], or anything really, any kind of growth that could cause it to pull to one side like that." [Coughs.]

Me: "Okay, I guess I'll go see the guy."

I wasn't too worried (for once) because I eat lots of turmeric and also because if you push on one side of my jaw, it keeps the other side from popping out. It seemed like if I had a restricting tumor that would be impossible. 

The oral surgeon was a nice man. I had to get a whole head, whole mouth x-ray, which I hated. I kept picturing all the x-rays zooming into my brain and I just really, really don't like all the harmful stuff I'm ALREADY exposed to. Anyway. No tumors! I think my dentist might be a little disappointed.

It turns out that the right side of my jaw is deteriorated, so the joint is kind of flattened instead of round like it should be. This makes that side ultimately shorter in length than the normal side, hence why my jaw pulls to one side when I open my mouth.

 
Oral surgeon's solution? To take some sort of major joint-specific anti-inflammatory and a muscle relaxor for two weeks and then see if that helped. I asked many questions, as I do, and he dealt with them all quite patiently.

It will help you to know that at this same time, I was also suffering major head/face pain from a deep cavity filled in my wisdom tooth. The only thing keeping me going insane was Ibuprofen.When offered something that would help numb the pain, I was exceptionally eager. Nothing like distracting pain to erode your willpower to stay away from prescription drugs.

Ultimately, I have taken the crazy drugs for about five days, but I started suffering ill-effects and have kind of backed off. I am supposed to go see oral surgeon dude again on Tuesday, who knows what he'll think of me now. In other news, the headache is gone! YAY!