Here is how my day has been so far:

I had an appointment for a filling in the lower right of my mouth. Things were going fine, and they gave me the freezing and started drilling. Then my jaw got dislocated and stuck open like it sometimes does while at the dentist. Usually, I just have to relax the muscles and it’ll slip back into place, but this time it didn’t. 🙁

The dentist tried to pop it back into place, but she wasn’t strong enough and didn’t really want to hurt me more. We eventually managed to get the left side working, but the right was pretty much a lost cause, so they called around to all the oral surgeons in town. One was out of town at his KW office for the day, one was prepping for surgery for a car accident facial reconstruction, and one was busy but said he could fit me in. Heading to the Emergency Department at the hospital was also discussed, but was rejected because a) the Guelph hospital is really slow, and b) they wouldn’t be as good with this sort of thing anyway, since it’s a dental issue. By this time, I was starting to panic a little because it had never happened for so long before, and I’ve always been able to get it back into place myself (except for the time when I got my wisdom teeth out, and the surgeon had to relocate it for me, but I had barely just woken up from the anaesthetic at the time, so I neither felt it nor cared). It’s kinda scary to try to relax a joint back into place, and then it won’t, because when it won’t it makes it that much harder to try to relax again. o_0 My dentist is a really super nice lady, and she was so upset about hurting me.

So I went downtown, drooling all the way since I couldn’t close my mouth or swallow (sexy!) and found the surgeon’s office. I luckily found parking around around the corner.

I had to fill out a bunch of medical and insurance forms since it was my first visit to that doctor, and then I sat in the waiting room, mouth agape, with a mom who was waiting for her kid to come out of surgery. I don’t know what kind, but he’d obviously been under some kind of sedation, because we started hearing a kid and the doctor singing loudly. We laughed at this, but I learned that laughing put exactly the wrong kind of pressure on a dislocated jaw, so I was laughing, drooling, and wincing, and the poor mom was doing her best not to laugh at me doing all this. It was actually pretty funny, except for the pain, which would likely have been a lot worse if I hadn’t already been all frozen on that half of my face. I had to stuff a wad of tissues in my mouth so I could look down to fill out the forms. I felt so classy.

When the surgeon saw me, it took him all of 10 seconds to say “You’re not going to like me very much for this”, stick his thumbs in my mouth and grab my jaw and drop it back into place. By that point I loved him for it, since it hurt soooo much less when it was back in place, and I could do fancy things like swallow my own spit and stop freaking out. He made me rest it for a little while, and then I got to pay $160 and was sent back to the dentist.

So I went back to get my filling finished, since they’d already started drilling so now it’s all open, but the dentist didn’t really want to keep going today since all my jaw muscles are all stretched and sore so there’s kinda a huge chance of it happening again if we tried more dental work right now, so it got rescheduled for tomorrow.

The entire adventure took about an hour and a half, and was stuck open for a good hour.

So now I’m frozen, with an open cavity, and really sore face/jaw/neck muscles and I feel pretty miserable. D:
I’m also hungry, but I can’t eat yet because I’m still frozen and will bite myself.