It’s been a bit of an ‘ouch’ this past week. Busy too. Since the pulling of the tooth we’ve been to London and Dublin.

The main purpose of this trip was to celebrate Jennifer’s graduation from King’s College in London. Our friend Rick “a-doodle-pop” flew in especially for the occasion too.

Anyway, back to the tooth. If you’ll remember, getting this troublesome tooth removed was in preparation for the exodus to California. Getting it done free in the UK made sense, of course.

Aside from the expected soreness associated with having a woman kneeling on one’s chest with a pair of pliers in one’s mouth, healing seemed to be progressing nicely. On the Sunday night after Thursday’s extraction, I awoke in our London hotel room with excruciating pain emanating from the extraction site. I took some painkillers and eventually went back to sleep.

Throughout the days I was able to keep the pain at bay with paracetamol and ibuprofen, but when their effects wore off the pain would quickly break through. This was what happened on Sunday night and every night subsequently up to the time of writing. At first I put this down to ‘healing pains’ associated with the trauma of the extraction. I had previously read about ‘dry socket’ or alveolar osteitis to give it its proper name. However, I didn’t think this was what I was experiencing as it only occurs in a small minority of cases and I had been taking care of my extraction site (or so I thought). Also, dry socket is meant to be really really painful and what I was experiencing was just really painful.

All this pain and pill-popping put somewhat of a damper on London and later Dublin until eventually our return to Durham on Thursday afternoon. I immediately telephoned my dentist for an appointment which I attended today. What da ya know, I have dry socket! Oooo. My dentist irrigated the socket and put some magic ‘stuff’ in it which will hopefully help it heal. There’s not a lot else that can be done beyond making it more comfortable for me, so time will tell. I also have to not poke it around (moi?) so must just let it lie. I shall try.

The only upside to all this is that – as a man – I’m not the greatest pain-bearer. However, dry socket – although uncomfortable and rather annoying – is not as bad as I thought it would be. Luckily for me the paracetamol/ibuprofen combo manages to keep the worst of the pain at bay and now I know what it is, that’s half the battle won.