Friday, January 28, 2011

No longer so sick and tired

Quick update, since I know you've all been agonizing over the status of my latest round of winter illness. :) After basically 2 weeks of feeling crummy, I finally felt good enough yesterday to go play volleyball. Hoping to get back to the exercise room at work tonight as well after two weeks away.  Not that I've been bed-ridden or anything. Just sore throat/congestion/coughing.  Still haven't kicked the cough yet, but I've at least stopped going through cough drops at an alarming rate, and I've been able to sleep my regular 8 hours which helps a lot too. And I would probably stop taking decongestant, except for an experience I had with my last cold back around Christmas time.

I was recovering from being sick and thought I was getting better, so I stopped taking medicine and then somehow managed to end up with congestion-related jaw pain. I assumed that something bad had happened to my teeth. Seriously, I couldn't even feel my molars coming together on the left side. Biting down would make me wince. Was thinking about making an appointment with my dentist for about a week. Then I mentioned it to my home teacher, and he asked if I'd been sick lately. He suggested that my congestion could have "settled" in my jaw in a way that was causing the problem.  This definitely came as a shock to me. Had never even heard of that possibility, much less experienced anything like that before.  I knew that inflamed sinuses could cause tooth pain in the top teeth where the teeth roots are right next to the sinus cavity.  But this was way back by my jaw muscles.  Anyway, on his urging, I took some decongestant that night and saw almost immediately, significant improvement in my situation. A few days of that and my jaw was back to normal. Who knew?

1 comment:

Liz said...

So glad you are on the mend and back to exercising.:)