Wisdom Tooth Woes

Fresh out of MBBS and a month into your prep for your exams to enter residency training, while struggling to memorise the differences between Mallory Weiss Syndrome and Booerhaave Syndrome, if your wisdom tooth suddenly starts to erupt, here’s a step-by-step guide on how to react if you’re a newly qualified, overstressed underconfident junior doctor.

1.First of all, have unilateral headaches for an entire week. BEFORE the tooth arrives.

2.Stress out over WHY you’re getting headaches all of a sudden and make your headache worse.

3.Drink more than your weight in coffee, adrak waali chai (ginger tea) and absolutely zero water.

4. Congratulations, you now have caffeine withdrawal headache too.

5. After an entire week of this cycle on repeat, wake up on Day 8 with tenderness over your right third molar, and realise the cause of the headache.

6. On Day 9, wake up to find that you can barely open your jaw, have to have all your meals in semi-liquid consistency with a spoon(because nothing else enters that minuscule space between your upper and lower incisors) and that the right side of your jaw has started to swell.

7. Reassure parents it is nothing you can’t handle, put your MBBS degree to good use, diagnose it as just a wisdom tooth area getting inflamed, and pop an anti-inflammatory drug(CHYMORAL FORTE, for those of you who were wondering. It’s mild on your stomach and yet a miracle drug. ALWAYS WORKS)

8. Day 10. The entire right side of your face has now puffed up, causing you to resemble half a marshmallow, and now it is excruciatingly painful to even touch your face. Clearly, chymoral isn’t enough.

9. Panic internally wondering if you have an abscess, pretend to keep a calm face in front of your parents so that they continue to believe you’re a great doctor, reassure yourself that if it were an abscess you should be having fever because you are NOT immunocompromised, curse the fact that you didn’t pay more attention during your ENT posting, google for possible differential diagnosis and get a mini panic attack seeing all the possible complications if you DO have a head and neck infection.

10. At 11:30 PM, pray to the powers above that you WILL take more care of your teeth, beseech that you aren’t ready to die yet because who’s gonna take care of Mom and Dad, take CHYMORAL thrice daily and check yourself every 30 minutes for signs of Ludwig’s Angina.

11. It’s still Day 10. Technically Night 10. Toss and turn but realise you can’t fall asleep because of the pain, somehow fall asleep at midnight but wake up at 2:00 AM because you slept on your right side and now the pressure has caused radiating pain to your ear as well, decide to stay awake till 7:00 AM because you don’t want the parents to panic, hope your abscess won’t burst and kill you before that, unlock your bedroom door and keep it open just in case it does burst and they need to recover your body.

12. Get an appointment with the nearest ENT specialist, mentally sort out the tops that do fit you in case you need to get admitted for an Incision and Drainage, and go to the doctor. A fully qualified postgraduate.

13. It’s not an abscess.(HA! I TOLD YOU SO)

14. It’s just your wisdom tooth causing a lot of inflammation, with a secondary infection of your submandibular lymph nodes. Treatable.

15. Come back armed with Ibuprofen, Paracetomol and Antibiotics and fall asleep in relief.

16. Stuff yourself with cake to celebrate because you’re not going to die.

The Return Of The Phoenix

I’m back! Older, hopefully a little wiser, ego just a little deflated(that comes with age, right) and with a ton of facial hair that when out together could probably rival Uncle Vernon’s moustache.

I know. You really didn’t need to know that. I can practically hear y’all yelling TMI!!

But it wouldn’t really be a post from the Phoenix without a Harry Potter reference now, would it? 😉

Where was I all this while? Trying not to drown among the zillions of medical textbooks. Passing my final year exams. Finishing my one year of compulsory rotations.

So. I’m officially a doctor. One that has seen a pandemic in her very first year of getting prefixed.

Now the good news is that my family, extended family and neighbours that have sprouted out of nowhere suddenly seem to think that I’m worth something . That I might actually know my stuff.

And that’s what I thought too. But honestly, in just one year of internship, I have REALLY, TRULY come to realise exactly how vast medical science is. Exactly how unpredictable it can be. How just a second could mean the difference between life and death. How pulling 56 hour shifts is no biggie in our country.How sexism is very much rampant, even amongst people in this noble profession. How preheld prejudices can very much affect our decisions and thereby outcomes.And I’ve also seen the ugly side, forcing me to take off my rose tinted glasses. But more on that later. I’ll be detailing this in a separate Med School page.

So I’m back. For better or for worse, I have no idea. I even toyed with the idea of pulling down this blog and creating a new one from scratch. Very nearly did too. But then I realised, that all this, all these posts, all the experiences, are very much a part of me. Even the funny, humiliating ones. Even the posts I chose to repost. So there’s no point in just uprooting yourself and planting yourself in a new plot, because the battlescars are what add to your story. These are what make you unique, what make you different from everyone else.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to be a bit more regular from now on. 😀 Can you guys believe this blog has been here since 2014?!