An Emergency Evening

Everyone should spend six hours in the emergency room from time to time. You are forced to sit, and endure, and wait without knowing when or if something is going to happen, good or bad or indifferent, which is a reminder that the universe does not and will not operate on your schedule no matter how much furtive eye contact you make with passing nurses and doctors. Bartenders are skilled at avoiding engagement from eye contact, but ER staff are on a whole other level.

More importantly, spending hours waiting for treatment in an ER is a stark reminder that some other people, and likely many more people, have it far, far worse. Old folks half out of their minds with pain or dementia or desperation or all of these, other middle-agers struck down by hearts and heads and lungs and limbs, disoriented young people and kids dealing with whole systemtic bodliy problems that push them along the spectrum from catatonic to loudly violent. And then there’s me, with a toothache.

I came to the ER because of increasingly maddening pain, in my back teeth and jaw, that had stumped both a dentist and ENT earlier that very day. The pain subsided somewhat via heavy ibuprofen but came back with a vengeance in the evening, leaving me gasping in the kitchen with disbelief at how much it hurt, like a vise grinding my back jaw, to the point where I couldn’t imagine it getting worse, and yet could very much imagine it getting worse, so I went to the ER.

Of course it is mostly pointless going to an ER for pain, when that pain has no clear cause and when the pain doesn’t appear to be an actual danger to the patient, beyond the suffering. All medical personnal have become understandably resistant to giving out pain medication, but nowhere is this resolve stiffer than in an ER, where addictive pain-med-seeking behavior became less transactional when the Sacklers got in trouble. After I told an ER doc that I had already seen a dentist and ENT for my sourceless pain, he laughed derisively and said, “Well I don’t know what you expect me to do.”

Perhaps fair. But what I wanted him to do was to make it stop hurting. He had zero interest in giving me anything for the pain, but he did grudgingly prescribe an antiobiotic. Maybe that will help! Sure, I’ll throw that penny down the wishing well, why not. I left the ER, then had to march right back in for more tests. This was because my sister who is both a nurse herself and keeper of the family medical lore pointed out the history of cardiovascular disease in our menfolk, and that jaw pain can be a clear sign of a heart attack.

Another few hours and an EKG and blood test later, I was cleared of heart troubles, for now. This made me glad but a small part of me was also frustrated that I still had no obvious cause of my pain and thus no clear path to immediate relief, i.e. good drugs. Xrays at the dentist ruled out cavities or abscess, and the ENT rudely inspected by sinuses with a cathode GoPro and found no sign of infection. I’ll get a CAT scan to check those sinuses for sure, but the ENT suspects TMJ, which is one of those maladies that they don’t really give you drugs for but instead make you wear a mouthpiece and do better posture. All of which I’ll perform, of course, because I don’t want to be soremouthed the rest of my life. No need to make the figurative quite so literal.