This year has been a roller-coaster with a lot going on. So here’s the health chapter.

TLDR: I’m okay now – or rather we haven’t been given reason to think otherwise. This is quite a long read. It is a story and I think some people were scared to ask. Read at your leisure.

In January, I went on a ski holiday – which I booked super-last minute – with some friends while we were out drinking. They had already booked it, and there was space for one more. I though, Why not? I called it my last holiday ever; I was only half joking.

On day three I dislocated my shoulder and stuck myself at the resort the rest of our stay. There was not a single thing to do there. Other than drink I suppose. I shelled out like 500£ for French healthcare. Boo.

So, all my life I’ve never suffered a broken bone or serious illness and here I am laughing cause of all the money I wasted on a last minute holiday I was never supposed to go on. There was a novelty in it, despite the inconvenience of it.

If you’ve never dislocated your shoulder, it isn’t a pleasant time. I won’t go into extreme detail, but your arm becomes quite weak, and if you’re a daredevil like me, you’ll try it out the sling (cause you have to wear a sling) too early and feel the muscles start to give out if you turn it the right way (or the wrong way I suppose). It needs quite a lot of time to heal, then that same amount of time again for physio. If, like me, you work in hospitality, there’s not a lot you can do with one arm. #zerohourscontracts

Anyway, flash forward to June.

I’ve not long got the keys to a shop in Stirling intent on making it into a little neighbourhood coffee shop. I’ve organised a skip, skip permit, and helping hands to gut and empty the place. It was an Opticians, one which the previous tenants near enough just locked the door and never came back. So there was a lot – I can not stress how much there was – of stuff to throw out.

At the start of the week, I start to have wisdom tooth teething pains. Nothing I can’t deal with, cause I have had my top teeth through without an issue. I put my head down and get on. I’m taking painkillers to give myself respite, while we’re emptying the shop. As the week progresses I take more and more pills, and my quantity/quality sleep becomes less and less. I wake up in pain, and sit like a zombie with Always Sunny playing as a distraction. The week ends. We have thrown out 4 skips worth of material. It’s time to knuckle down and transform this place.

I tell my dad I’m going for a nap, I didn’t sleep well the night before, and he’s going to wait for the guy collecting the final skip.

There’s not a lot I remember about the rest of that day. I had taken an opiate painkiller to try get on top of the pain – a french packet of pills from when I dislocated my shoulder about 5 months earlier.

I was conscious for what came next but I don’t remember it.

My mum and my dad had crossed paths at my flat, as my dad was leaving and my mum was arriving to meet me. They agreed they should put me in the car and take me back to my mums so she could keep an eye on me. We decided that it was time to go to the dentist.

So, my lower wisdom teeth are impacted. The pain I was experiencing on my right side, like chiselling, the dentist says is caused by infection. He gives me antibiotics and refers me for an extraction which could take up to 6 weeks.

During all this chat, I laugh inwardly that the word for brewing coffee and the surgery I’m so desperate for are the same.

At this stage I’m taking co codamol, then ibuprofen two hours after that, then co codamol 2 hours after that, and so on until I can’t take anymore. I’ve got dihydrocodeine as back up but it does absolutely nothing for me. The prospect of not really sleeping for 6 weeks is pretty horrid. Eating isn’t even a passing worry, I’m not hungry.

When I have had my quota of painkillers I’m writhing in pain. Like, full on twisting and turning, clenching and groaning, I’m not crying but I feel that self pity that I’m almost ready to start pulling teeth myself. Once or twice I tried to wedge things inbetween my teeth to relieve the pressure I’m feeling along my jaw. It’s like my teeth are all being pressed together in a vice, and my jaw bone is the collateral to their movement. I’ve never felt so sorry for myself.

I’m lucky because my mum works in the hospital to which I was referred. She knew who to ask and what to do. I managed to get an emergency extraction a few days later.

Relief.

This is only the start of this story.

So when I meet the dental surgeon he’s so confident and charming that I of course defer to his judgement on all things dental. He’s the one with the training and years of experience. There’s just something a little off in the way he keeps telling me I’m “just teething” when I haven’t slept in nearly 2 weeks.

He gives me a local and sends me home to get some sleep, but the local wears off and I’m still unable to sleep. All it really does is let me shift my codeine to later in the day… Yippee.

The next day I come back and they take the tooth out which, by the way, is horrific. They near enough climb on top of you and use a dental crowbar to wedge the damn thing out. He gives me a pack of antibiotics and says I should take them “if you feel you need to.” Meanwhile, he’s told me to stop taking the antibiotics my dentist issued. This is probably an important detail.

So it’s out. As I said before. Utter relief. I sleep better than I’ve slept in weeks. It’s still sore, I still take painkillers, but this is nothing by comparison. I feel like I can function again. I try to set stuff up for the shop, get work moving etc.

A week passes.

The wound has tried really hard to heal but seems to be struggling. I get on with it, clean it as best I can. I’m going through mouthwash like its my new vice.

Another week passes.

The gum around my premolar 5 has swelled up and I’m not sure why. The extraction site is still pretty messy, and now my premolar is wobbling. I start taking those antibiotics, for lack of a better idea.

I call the dental surgeons, asking if they offer anything much by the way of aftercare. They say yes of course. Can I come in today?

“It’s just a bit of gum disease,” the dental surgeon says. “You need to brush better.”

He tells me to come back in a week.

I brush so hard I brush a hole in my swollen gum. When the 5 days of amoxicillin has run out, the hole I’ve brushed in my gum has started to weep pus.

So I go back to the dental surgeons. I’m seen by another person. She thinks I’m a new arrival and starts making me fill out forms. I comply, trying to explain the situation. She begrudgingly accepts, probably thinking someone should have shared that information with her. She’s rough on my face, like really rough. Wobbles the tooth til my eyes are leaking. She doesn’t know what to do; say’s I should see a hygienist. “We just take stuff out,” she says. While we’re waiting on another opinion, she decides to send me for an x-ray.

It’s quite hard to get an x-ray of your premolar 5’s roots FYI – especially when everything’s swollen AF. I have massive pieces of plastic wedged into my mouth while they point the x-ray at me, saying “Stay still” and run off to hit the button before something moves out of place. I kept a stern composure, but honestly it was traumatic. They made 3 attempts. Imagine your site of surgery and infection being battered with hands and tools for a solid half hour.

The first surgeon comes back into the picture. He looks at the x-ray and says there’s no sign of infection. Pokes and prods the gum until all that comes out is blood. He’s happy about that. I just need to see a hygienist. He discharges me back to my dentist.

My dentist sees me the next day and takes one look at my warzone of a mouth and near enough swears under his breath. “We’re going to hammer this,” he says and writes a prescription for doubled up antibiotics amoxicillin and metronidazole. It’s a weeks worth of pills so we make an appointment for the following week.

A week passes and the pus is still all over the premolar and extraction site. He says we’ll give it another week and writes another prescription.

Honestly, it started to shift it, I thought, at the time. But another week passed and it wasn’t healed. The wobbly tooth has started to firm up though, which is a first for a long time. That’s an improvement, right? So surely we’re heading in the right direction, I say.

The dentist doesn’t look convinced. Calls his colleague in for another opinion. They agree.

“This is beyond our capabilities. You’ll need something stronger that we can’t prescribe.”

He refers me back to the MaxFacs clinic and writes a prescription for 2 weeks worth of double the dose of the previous prescription and says bye with “good luck”.

Whatever he wrote in his referral shook things up that’s for sure, because I wasn’t seen by the other dental surgeons but rather a group of consultants. The type that have climbed so high they get called “Mr” again rather than “Dr”. They say it’s likely the infection has penetrated the bone, which is why the oral antibiotics haven’t cleared it. Bone has a very restricted blood supply, so they need intravenous antibiotics, and a lot of them, to get on top of it. They’re talking about a CT scan, but other than that they don’t give much away.

I see them again the next day and try to get some info out about the way my case was handled, and this guy gives nothing away. He’s closed ranks, and we sit in the room in an uncomfortable silence. I ask something to the effect of “what are we waiting on?” and he replies, “We’re just away to see if there’s a bed.”

It’s Friday, and I’m admitted to a ward. Everyone goes home and I’m there for the weekend. I’m perfectly able, but I have to hang about in this bed until my daily IV. Not only a total waste of my time and theirs, but a total waste of NHS money. They say I can get off the ward during the day, so a few times I took them up on that. Being in the ward means I have faster access to treatment. Clearly I need it. I don’t think I wholly understand the gravity of it.

Monday comes around the the place is manic. I’m taken for a CT scan, fitted for a PICC line, taken for an x-ray, and seen by the consultants and the infectious diseases and OPAT team.

PICC lines are something to behold. It’s a catheter that runs from your bicep all the way up your arm and drops down into your chest. The guy that put it in was a pro; i barely felt a thing. A bunch of Stirling Uni student nurses are kicking about the hospital during my stay, so there’s some familiarity. One girl is watching the placement of my PICC and so the surgeon – in intensive care I’ll add – is talking through the process. He has to tell me the things that might go wrong, like the line going up into my neck; I have to turn my chin into my shoulder to try stop that happening. “There’ll be some blood here, but that’s normal.” I close my eyes cause I’ve had so much intrusive stuff happen to me that I decide I can do without this. After he’s finished I do look and damn – there was a lot of blood.

Until the x-ray comes back they can’t use the PICC for the IV cause if its in the wrong place then they could shoot your brain full of antibiotics – or something like that. In the mean time I’m stuck with the cannula, which hurts to high hell for some reason. No one else is bothered but I feel like my arms being blown up by a bike pump.

I’m told I’m going for surgery to debride my jaw. I’m told there’s a chance I’ll lose my back 3 teeth. I’m devastated. In the mean time I have to hold out and stick around the ward. The plan is to open my gum and clean out the jaw bone of any infected tissue and stitch me up again, keep me on the IV and oral antibiotics for 6 weeks, and hope to see signs of remodelling in the bone after that time. It’s great to hear there’s a plan for me, but the 6 week timeline isn’t something I can make an awful lot of sense in my mind. The doctors can’t speak with certainty in anything for fear of being held to account, and so their noncommittal language is anxiety inducing too.

The day of the surgery comes and I’m put into a gown and taken down in my bed. It’s funny, cause I can walk and I’m being pushed around like a toddler. The surgery is under general anaesthetic so I’m prepped for all that. I’ve holes up and down my arms from cannulas. I’ve been under general 2 times before this, and this is the only time it was pleasant. It feels like rest.

I wake up and the first thing I do is tongue my teeth. Or rather, the gap.

It seems like a silly thing to be upset about, because I only lost one tooth. But the feeling I had was failure. I had done everything I could to try and aid this situation, and the outcome was still this. I had given up every detail and symptom, had the timeline to a T, and still…

I fell out with a nurse that night. I was probably short with her, however I maintain that if she wants to put some drug inside my body, I should have the information to agree, not just blindly accept. “You can refuse it if you want,” she says, and I try to explain that I just want to understand. She doesn’t like that and so I tell her to piss off. I’m not proud of that. Her colleague explains it to me that the blood thinner is for patients that are bed bound and this is an effort to avoid clots in their legs post-op. I say “my mouth is full of blood and stitches, why would I take a blood thinner when I’m up and able?” She shrugs and says “you’ll be out tomorrow.”

For the next 3 or so weeks I was making daily trips to the hospital for the IV antibiotics, which was a bit of a bind, however it meant I had a little more freedom. After meeting with the leader of OPAT I was put on high strength orals instead, giving me back the ability to work uninterrupted for the last while. Antibiotics are tough on the body, especially at this strength. The IV just made me tired AF, and the orals mess your gut up so much you never quite know if you’re going to have lactose-intolerance and IBS for the rest of your days.

The 6 week mark came around and I had my CT scan.

“There has been marginal signs of  bone remodelling.”

Nothing happens quickly in recovery, but damn does it go wrong quickly. That was the sign that nothing was stopping healing taking place; essentially, that infection wasn’t present – ish.

I had my first beer in near enough 9 weeks and didn’t make a big deal of it at the time. I wanted some normality. I can’t imagine a life with chronic illness. If I’ve learned anything this year, it’s that I love healthcare, and I’m so glad that I can contribute to a service that helps people the way it helped me.

I do however criticise openly the pathways that lead me back to my dentist and landed me in a bed so long after symptoms were present. I can’t comment on whether it was the “correct” protocol. But I can say that if the dentist said “Lets hammer this”, while the surgeon said “you need to brush better” something doesn’t add up. I was put on antibiotics by healthcare professionals 4 weeks after my extraction; during this time I took the amoxicillin the surgeon gave me, though there were unspecified instructions. I told him it didn’t shift the symptoms. Corrective action could have been made a great deal earlier. It would have saved us all time and money. Maybe the outcome would have been the same. Best not be bitter.

Anyway. I’m okay. My mouth actually looks healthy again, even though I look like I’ve been in a few brawls. There’s no reason to think that there’s any infection present, but now and again I get little aches and pains that makes the hair on the pack of my neck stand up. We often learn from things going wrong, and usually it’s just an anxious feeling saying “What’s this I don’t like this.”

Anyway.

Back to the rest. Back to work.

Coffee shop is coming soon. Follow @hbwcoffee on Instagram