When is broken tooth not a broken tooth

Last week while diving on the Shark/Yolanda reef I got a stabbing pain in my upper jaw - right at the back where your wisdom teeth usually are. I say usually are cos I no longer have mine.

Anyway, after poking about with my tongue and working out that if I press here I feel like I'm being electrocuted I decided that not pressing here was the order of the day. It started getting more and more problematic though and within a few days I was knocking back loads of Ibruprofen. Incidentally, on the ibruprofen story in the UK you're advised not to take more than 1800mg ish a day, maybe at a push 2400mg. After chatting to the drug man in Sharm he advised they did 800Mg tablets and I could take up to 4000Mg per day - I wasn't convinced to start but by the end of the tip I was knocking it back like nothing.

Slowly got worse to the point by Monday morning I was in an awful lot of pain - couldn't eat or apply pressure to my teeth.... So off to the dentist I trot. He poked me about a bit and suggested a jaw ex-ray as he couldn't find anything wrong with my actual teeth.

X-ray shows a hairline fracture in my upper jaw going back from the tooth in front of where my upper-left wisdom tooth used to be......

Well, today is my first day without ridiculous pain in my face and I also managed to eat some solid food. I achieved this state of nirvana by yesterday attending hospital and undergoing an operation to have my jaw pinned back together - in the process losing another tooth at the upper back.

So today, the sharp excruciating pain has gone, and I'm back to being sore. Sore I can cope with.

Funny thing was toward the end of (last) week and this weekend I thought I just had a broken tooth and was being a big girl's blouse.... It's kind of a relief that I wasn't.

Both the doc and the dentist were curious as to how I didn't know I'd done something more serious - the only thing I can think of is that as the pain came on a lot worse Saturday on ward was that the pain was being dulled by my use of Nitrox last week while diving? I.e. the pain came on pretty sharply once I'd stopped diving?

Well, you live and learn. I think I've had my fair share of hospitals now and I'd really, really like it if somebody else could give it a go from now on. Thanks very much.

I'm off to try and eat a bacon sandwich.

Here's a question - how come everytime I got to Egypt I start pining for Bacon sandwiches?