At 6 months, starting to feel like a "lifer"

PERMANENCY
After reading that if you aren't healed in 3 months, chances of this being permanent are likely, I must say at this point, I am one of those victims, but I still hope in time things fade more, as they have for others. Everyone feels pain differently though. Everyone's story is slightly different, and each, so unfortunate. It really helps to hear from others who've been though this, for me at least.

Funny thing about this injury, it is maddening trying to figure it out. On the one hand, I still have pain from simple things like putting on sunglasses - when the frame crosses over my left temple, I wince- still, 6 months after injury. But the chewing on broken glass feeling subsided long ago, never to return, however was replaced by other annoying symptoms - all less painful, but painful nonetheless.

The stinging now is sometimes at the left tip of tongue, but generally it's the overall rugburn more all over the middle of the tongue. The teeth ache and sometimes smiling still hurts.

It is hard to go about life cheerfully and I can't help but look around sometimes at all these people who don't realize I"m in pain, but I can't keeping whining about it all the time. I think, how lucky they are to lead these "normal" lives without their mouth on fire all the time...they have no idea...

TRIGGERS
I already have low blood sugar issues, so notice it is a really BAD IDEA to go hungry. But, I hate to eat when my mouth is quiet in the morning. So I put it off...until I'm ravenous, and the pain fires up right along with the hunger. Sugar may be a culprit, but not nearly so much as STRESS. That has to be the #1 thing. I feel the least pain when I'm so sleepy I'm nearly dozing off - the nerves must just be so relaxed at that point.

I am STILL having pain in my root canals months later, and was told by my latest endodontist this is not normal, so I am going back to the endo who did the first root canal next week. I was told not to have crowns put on til everything "settles"...LOL...can they possibly understand how "unsettled" my mouth is, and has been, for months on end? I don't know when I will ever be able to finish this dental work, and am just trying to be very careful not to chew anything sticky or have anything on the left side of my mouth.

I still haven't found a job, in spite of many close calls and promised offers. My daughter is starting college, so I've been wrapped up in those events, and the stress of having your firstborn and best friend leave home is overwhelming. Trying to act happy and positive around her, but sometimes I can't hide the sadness.

Keeping busy is a distraction, but I am still having to take at least one vicodin to get through the day or I am a bitch on wheels, because of the pain. I'm in big trouble as it seems that prescription runs out sooner than I will recover, and doctors don't like to write prescriptions for narcotics.

ADVICE
I was told by yet another attorney that this is the risk you take any time you get an injection, and though she greatly sympathizes with me (she really does), you cannot sue for malpractice just because the dentist is a jerk, who wouldn't admit he'd caused the injury, nor treat it, in fact, may have even sent me on a wild goosechase trying to keep me of his back, until I realized it was his fault. I plan to call him and meet with him, if he'll agree to it, to show him the stack of medical bills and 2 gallon sized bag of meds, so that he should know what he did. I don't know why, I just think it will make me feel better. By the same token, that meeting will be so stressful for me, I just know it will be a horrible day of burning tongue. And so it goes...

I'm taking a little Advil as the endo recommended it as anti-inflamatory, as well as daily doses of vitamin B in the methyl form (because it absorbs better but, of course, is more expensive than the cyan version). That attorney I mentioned spoke with a dentist friend of hers, who knew of lingual nerve injuries, but had only caused 2 in his 40 year career, and he recommended going back on the B for nerve healing. I don't see any change yet. If I could afford the laser, I'd go back to that, because I do think it was helping.