Zenarchery

I broke down and went to UMC.

It wasn’t a salivary stone at all. Mea culpa. I was wrong.

Instead, I have been told that apparently the entire lower half of my skull consists of four severly impacted wisdom teeth. One has punctured my maxillary sinus. Another is disrupting the movement of my jawbone. And this one is one giant abscessed mess. I am going to be spending the next few months of my life making friends with oral surgeons. The nurse told me these should have come out a decade ago…and now they’ve grown upwards and forwards. She literally suggested that I was probably lucky I don’t have tusks growing out of the sides of my face like a goddamn triceratops.

Also, I’m borderline diabetic.

I can’t afford this at all. My God. I’m so fucked right now.

• Topicane 4% lidocaine topical anaesthetic: $16.50
• Disposable pocket scalpel: $0.69
• Medical precision tweezers: $4.33
• Sterile sutures: $10.00
• Information from the Web on various procedures to remove stone from Wharton’s duct: free

Not having to pay some retard doctor $2500 for an hour’s worth of simple surgical procedure? Priceless.

[Update: No, I’m not really going to do this. Well, probably not.]

So I definitely have a blocked sublingual gland. I’ve been alleviating the symptoms by…well, you don’t want to know. I seem to have a salivary calculus, or stone, in my sublingual gland under my tongue. I’ve been trying to dislodge it (which is ungodly painful), but I think it’s too big. (This just happens sometimes, and nobody knows why.)

I don’t qualify for Medicaid. I can’t afford insurance. I’ve tracked down the specific procedure required and I would do it myself, but A) I couldn’t do it without a fuck ton of Lidocaine and some specialized probes for dilating my salivary duct, and B) I’d be very, very afraid of cutting my facial nerve and ending up looking like the Joker. There’s also an ultrasonic treatment, but I’m not sure how I’d go about that.

(That probably sounds nuts. But hell, I’m broke and insurance free, and I’m a DIY kind of cat. I could probably build an ultrasonic probe that would break the stone up, given a bit of time.)

It’s probably not life-threatening unless it gets infected. It just hurts like a sonofabitch whenever I eat anything.

So, if you’re of the praying or hoping persuasion, hope and pray for me that I get the job I’m currently applying for, so I can get insurance and get this fucker cut out of my mouth.

I have what is either an infected sublingual gland or cancer. (It’s like a big sore lump under my tongue.) All the medical info I can find suggests the former — sublingual glands occasionally get the equivalent of kidney stones that block them and fill them to bursting with saliva — which is sort of good, but it hurts like a sonofabitch when I eat (it’s like rubbing salt into a cut in your mouth) and I’m not sure what to do about it, other than bite the bullet and go to a doctor, who will either drain it or perform surgery to remove the gland (according to the Internets). Since I don’t have insurance, I’m not sure how this will work.

Goddamnit. Anybody know a cheap ear, nose and throat doctor in Vegas?