Wisdom Teeth Removal: Tea Bags to the Rescue
And do steroids aggravate migraines? Maybe...
So I had my wisdom teeth removed on Friday. The procedure went great. My dentist is pretty terrific, and he helped me feel at ease by telling me exactly what he was doing and then humming along with 80s songs while he was working. I had opted out of sedation.1 The two options were basically Valium or nitrous oxide. I said no to both. Frankly, I don’t like getting high.
The doctor also used copious amounts of local anesthetic to numb my gums and jaw. In fact, when he was done, my lower lip and jaw was so numb I looked like a stroke patient. That part actually bothered me the most. I also wonder if that large amount of local anesthetic was making me a little bit anxious, with an increased heart rate. Or maybe it was the steroids. Or both.
I did have to go back to the dentist right after I went home, because the wound seemed to be bleeding too much, and at that time they put me on a heart rate monitor, along with the blood pressure cuff. Everything was within “normal” range, but I knew my blood pressure and my heart rate was a little bit up. It didn’t calm down until the next day.
The procedure itself involved a lot of pushing, pulling, and cracking of teeth. Because I was fully awake and aware, I was paying attention to everything that happened. The thing is, I couldn’t feel anything. The dentist started on my left side, and it seemed like it was taking forever.
I kept thinking, When are you going to get that tooth out? If all of them take this long this is just going to be excruciating! It really wasn’t that I was in pain, it’s just not fun and you’re kind of bored. You just want to get it over with. Plus, as I said, I think that anesthetic was making me a little anxious, even more than the procedure itself.
So the dentist was doing his thing over on the left side, and I was just waiting for him for what seemed to be forever to move over to another tooth. Finally, he got over to the right side and I was so happy. At that point I started to relax and even hummed along kind of in my mind with the 80s tunes. I noticed that he was switching between my top and bottom tooth on the right side. I guess the anesthetic was maybe not quite as strong at that point on the right. I then realized that he’d actually done both teeth both teeth on the left, and I was so unable to feel it that it just felt like it was one tooth! So suddenly, he was done. Yay!
And to be honest, once you get used to the idea of someone cracking your teeth in your mouth, I don’t think that getting the wisdom teeth out was any more uncomfortable than getting a deep periodontal cleaning aka scaling and root planing. The periodontal deep cleanings involve those high screeching ultrasound devices that drive me nuts!
So I don’t regret not doing the sedation at all, in fact I’m extremely glad I did not do it. I’m even doubly glad, because whether it was the steroids or the anesthetic, I do think my nervous system was a little amped up from whatever it was, and I didn’t need anything more to make it more dicey.
The main problem was actually the aftermath of the procedure, not the procedure itself. I just could not get that bleeding to stop. I got home, and I probably waited a little bit over half an hour, which was my first mistake, and then tried to replace the gauze. But first, I tried to just drink a tiny bit, which was also a mistake because my lower lip was still very numb, and everything was dripping out and it was bloody as hell.
It seemed like a lot more blood than it should be, and because it was Friday before Memorial Day weekend, I had my dad drive me back to the dentist office right away just in case. When I had gotten my tonsils out (granted, I had been 19 years old), had a problem with an artery in my throat not clotting, and they had to sew it up. But in the meantime, I swallowed a whole hell of a lot of blood and freaked out the doctors. So with this in mind, I just wanted to make sure that I was clotting properly after my wisdom teeth were removed. I went back to the dentist, and it looked like everything was fine, so they gave me extra gauze after monitoring me for a little bit, and I went back home.
The rest of the day was spent changing gauze every half hour, which was annoying as all hell, and meant I couldn’t take a full nap, which I really needed. I just was exhausted by everything. The dental team had also told me that I could use a tea bag to help with the clotting. I looked this up and black tea has tannins in it that can help with wisdom tooth wound clotting.
I looked in our cupboard, and it turned out we had a whole big thing of decaffeinated Lipton black tea bags in a convenient small size. I don’t like black tea, but I’m glad we had it here at home. Because once I started putting the black tea bags in, I finally felt I was starting to get some traction with the bleeding. At first, I started just doing tea bags once in a while.
The blood wasn’t gushing, but it was still ample enough that I did text the dentist about 7:30 PM just in case there was an issue. I also sent him a picture of what my gaze was looking like at that point. He was not concerned; he said: “If you need to go to the ER, you’ll know it. You will be bleeding profusely and having other issues like feeling faint or nauseous. I do not think that’s what’s happening here, it sounds like you’re right on track.”
But he did tell me that I needed to be biting down on the gauze, and sometimes if it gets caught in your teeth and isn’t far back enough, you’re not getting enough pressure on the wound. At this point I just went for straight tea bags. They were uncomfortable and sometimes they would hit my gag reflex. But the tea bags that seemed to do a much better job at stemming the bleeding, whether it was the extra weight of the bag or the tannins…it was probably both.
The blood still hadn’t completely clotted by the time I went to bed around midnight, which means I spent almost 12 trying to get everything to clot. Fortunately, everything was all good in the morning (they tell you to not put the gauze or tea bags in while sleeping, and keep your head up).
The moral of this story is, if you or someone in your family is going to get their wisdom teeth out, make sure you have some decaffeinated tea bags on you – black tea not herbal tea – and make sure that they’re small enough that they can fit into the wisdom teeth area.
Wisdom Teeth Removal Triggered a Vestibular Migraine?
It’s now been five days and I seem to be healing OK. But one odd thing that has happened, however, is that my vestibular issues have been acting up. Now, I started steroids and ibuprofen on Friday. These are both highly anti-inflammatory. I was curious to see if being on these anti-inflammatory medications would actually help with my nerve symptoms and my dizziness.
Well, the only thing that’s really been helped are some basic things like hand pain when I wake up and my frozen shoulder has been a lot better. But I’m still waking up with my nerves buzzing in my face, and I have actually been more dizzy than usual. Two days after my wisdom teeth removed, I had just finished my breakfast, and some contents of my intestines shifted, and all of a sudden the room moved in a dramatic, brief bout of vertigo. This sort of thing happens to me possibly about once a month or maybe less, and it’s always freaky when it happens, and I know it’s my vagus nerve.
I hadn’t been using my electrical vagus nerve stimulation for a while, but I used it afterwards, and found it calmed down the anxiety I had been feeling since the procedure dramatically. But I’m still having mild dizziness and vestibular dysfunction. This is concurrent with migraine symptoms of mild but throbbing pressure, mostly on the right side of my head.
Some of this is the weather, because these symptoms always get worse when a rain front comes through.
What I figured out might be happening with the vestibular dysfunction is the following: The steroids and ibuprofen are vasodilatory, and vasodilation is associated with migraines. My ENT had speculated that I was having vestibular migraines. So to see that the steroids and ibuprofen are actually not helping with the vestibular dysfunction, but possibly making it worse, would actually verify the diagnosis of vestibular migraines as being the main cause of my chronic dizziness and feeling off kilter. Thus, my problem is not inflammation. (I also wonder if some chronic virus might also be helping out but that’s for another article).
This theory also potentially leads credence to the idea I’ve been having that the Flonase my ENT also wanted me to take for my eustachian tube dysfunction may also be similarly problematic, and maybe creating more of a tendency for vestibular migraines, though perhaps less so since it’s not systemic like a Medrol pack of steroids.
At any rate, part of what I’ve done to try to mitigate this (with vasoconstriction) is to increase my salt intake and I have tried putting a bit of an ice pack on the side of my head, ironically, which I had prepared for my teeth, but I didn’t need for my teeth whatsoever.
The medications otherwise had done a great job of keeping my swelling down and also completely removing pain. I only stopped the ibuprofen today, and I have a mild bit of pain, but other than that everything is pretty good. (I’ve also done a 5-day stint of amoxicillin. That’s going to be done tonight, and now it’s time for probiotics.)
I go back to the dentist on Friday to get checked out, and hopefully everything will be healing properly, and my vestibular migraine will be calmed down once the steroids are stopped tomorrow. As you know, these types of steroids need to be stepped down – you can’t just stop them out of the blue. Two pills left. I can’t wait until I’m done with them. Some people like steroids. Not me.
That’s probably more information than you needed but now what the hell, maybe it’ll help somebody.
Sedation is not used for the pain. It is used to calm you down during the procedure. The local anesthetic makes you numb in the area so you don’t feel anything in the mouth during the procedure. I did get local anesthetic.
This begins to look like a conversation! I had (or rather, my husband had, as he was the original wine-maker), a collection of little books on wine-making from English authors--the generic term for the product is "country wines"--those made not from grapes, but from garden fruits, vegetables. I was also actively interested in historic practices, e.g., Lady Eleanor Fettiplace's "Lemmon mead" recipe (I think that was 16th C). A fun note--grapes contain 4 acids (no doubt others, but I'm no chemist) necessary for becoming wine: tannic, tartaric, citric, malic. In these old English recipes (receipts?) one was directed to add lemons, sliced, (the citric), raisins (the tartaric), black tea (tannic)--don't remember how the malic was handled. Perhaps apple slices. I had in mind to make specific herbal wines (lavender, lemon balm) which I would use when cooking. Made those wines, but never got around to using them. Well, a new era of life is now mine, so perhaps once again I will essay this. Also, at a restaurant in St. Andrews (Scotland) in 2002, I had oak-leaf wine--oh, delicious! and wanted so to make it but never got around to it.
Tannins and astringents---decades ago, a bottle of the strawberry soda made from a beyond-bumper crop of strawberries (and bottled in champagne bottles under crown caps) proved to be under way too much pressure when opened. The bottle "exploded"; strawberry delight and broken glass flew up; a a shard right flew right under, and into, my chin. Blood ran freely. Must have mashed a kleenex on the wound, but ran out to the herb garden, grabbed a handful of yarrow, chewed it and stuck the paste onto the wound. Bleeding stopped, right away, if I remember correctly. Husband took me to ER; nurses wondered what on earth was this crud on my chin.....( I think they were a bit scared).