Tramadol

Hello!

How is everyone doing? It feels as if it has been ages since I talked to you guys – it was August last year! Sorry! Hope you are all well. I would write more but I’m a boring bugger and don’t have loads to talk about.

What a year! I drove to Pisa with a friend (clearly he did the driving!) and returned with a puppy – a proper Italian Spinone! I’ve called her Mela – mela is the Italian for ‘apple’ and Cienna loved them. I wanted the new pups name to be connected to Cienna somehow as she is still such a massive loss. Apart from a 24hour hiccup with Melas paperwork, it was such an incredible experience – hopefully I’ll have the opportunity to drive to Italy again soon!

I got a job! Somebody actually employed me! For the last 10 months I’ve been working as an Associate Lecturer at UWE. I didn’t think I’d like the job but I actually really enjoyed it. Half the time I was tutoring or supervising students which was quite challenging – working with some students can be so easy whereas others can be….. difficult to say the least! I also taught the majority of the third years module on sport and exercise psychology, I loved it – I thought I’d get nervous and sound really pissed (my speech gets worse when I’m nervous) but I didn’t and the course was one of the most popular with no real drop in student attendance. Then there’s the marking – tedious!

Recently I’ve settled down with Rowan, she is so amazing, I am really lucky. We explored Budapest together at the beginning of the year which I’m not really enamoured with (its not Italy I guess), and she’s looked after me so well through all this craziness. It has been mad hasn’t it?! All because some idiot decided to eat a poor bat! I find all the finger pointing and blaming so sad. It is as if some people believe the virus and lockdown is voluntary and the Government is having a laugh! TV shows only seem to interview editors rather than experts. Apparently, most of the country know more than the scientists and they would have dealt with the pandemic much better than Boris Johnson, well, as long as they had hindsight!

Lockdown didn’t really affect me much until my tooth started playing up. For the last 18 months I’ve had a problem with a wisdom tooth and about a year ago the dentist decided it needed to come out. Its ok because this would be done under a general anaesthetic and its opportunity to do all the other things that dentist can’t do while I’m awake. I have a lot of movement, especially when stressed or trying to keep still, and I’m almost phobic of needles so x-rays, fillings etc., can’t really be done while I’m conscious. At this point my tooth was just sensitive to cold food so not a real problem.

Beginning of the year I had the boring pre-op health check and the consultation regarding the op. I pointed out that I may need diazepam to calm me down before the procedure, mainly to be able to knock me out! I asked how long for the op as it was becoming uncomfortable and they said 12-14months! They were being serious! I should add here that during the consultation there was a ‘facial expert’ (they were concerned about nerve damage) and she nodded off! Very professional!

Anyway, since then more of my tooth has crumbled away exposing the nerve, I’ve had an emergency dental appointment which was useless – the tooth has to come out and I need to me knocked out to do it. I am now considered urgent. But somebody ate a bat, spread a virus and now the whole world is in turmoil and they have no idea when the op can go ahead. I’m in significant amounts of pain. Initially I began with ibuprofen and paracetamol but when you are a spastic and experience pain regularly, you learn very quickly which drugs work. These two had no effect so I turned to naproxen for the inflammation and tramadol for the pain – no more pain!

Its been 3 months now and its getting silly. Still no news. I do get the odd spell of 5 days pain, and therefore drug-free, which is nice. I also try and restrict my use of tramadol because the side effects are crazy! I just want the tooth out.

So, what have we learnt? Spastics and dentists don’t mix!