Slow horses to the rescue

Oh, my god, poor me. Yes, yes, I know: I could have gone to a dentist last year when this first flared up, but I didn’t. (Not my fault they never called me back, she moans.)

Entering fifth day of antibiotics. Far from getting smaller the fucking pus ball in my mouth seems to be getting bigger. I swear to god it is the size of a ping pong ball now. Absolutely fucking agonising. There is a space between my front teeth that wasn’t there a week ago. The fucking abscess is pushing my teeth apart.

The heavy duty pain killers that were such a godsend on Friday are already wearing thin. I’m only allowed four a day, but fortunately each one lasted four hours, so it was all a matter of timing. They don’t seem to be lasting four hours anymore. Is it the end of the world to take five in a day? I begin to understand the opioid crisis. When you’re dealing with pain you just don’t care. (These aren’t opioids – they’re a Tylenol/codeine mix.)

An acquaintance on Facebook (who did it herself) suggests taking matters into my own hands – just sterilise a needle, stick it in, spit out pus, rinse with salt water. I’d already been thinking about doing this, but I am a coward. Thought about it again after her Facebook comment, then checked on-line. Medical sites positively discourage this procedure. Apparently you can actually poison yourself. What do they know?

Said medical sites suggest a course of antibiotics should shrink the abscess to nothing within a week. Past experience (clearly not this one) suggested a quicker response. Still, day five. Surely the fucking thing should be getting smaller, not larger? What the fuck?

Pain really does fuck with your brain. Why is this happening to me? (Well, other than the obvious fact that I didn’t deal with the underlying problem months ago.) Why am I being punished? What sin was so great that I deserve a fucking ping pong ball of pus in the roof of my mouth?

I can barely function, barely move. Yesterday and the day before I didn’t get out of the house to water the garden until eight o’clock at night.

The only thing keeping me going is a decision I made before the pus hit the fan to order the three remaining Mick Herron Slough House novels, rather than waiting months for them to turn up from the library.  The parcel arrived in my post box on Friday, collected after a trip to the village to pick up my prescription pain killers.

I’m halfway through the second one already. I fucking love these novels, these characters. Flatulence aside (and even that is kind of funny), I fucking love Jackson Lamb, the leader of the disgraced spies who’ve been dispatched to Slough House to either die of boredom or give up and quit the service. In their own way, I love all the characters. (Don’t get too attached – Herron regularly kills one off.) Imagine George Smiley as a fuck up and John Le Carre having a wicked sense of humour.

There is a certain type of British humour, at which Herron excels, that you either love or you (inexplicably) don’t. I love these books so much that back in March, when the Bad Girls Book Club didn’t have another novel waiting (and members felt something funny might be useful in the midst of a pandemic), I recommended the first book in the series.

To my surprise, only one other Bad Girl loved the characters as much as I did. Most were mildly amused and a couple complained that the writing was “too clever”. Too clever? Is that possible? Apparently some people think so. No accounting for taste.

Anyway, thank heavens for Jackson and River and Catherine and – yes – even Roddy. Without them I might have lost the will to live in the past couple of days.

Hopefully the pus pain will be resolved before I get to the end of Joe Country. Maybe I should order the rest of the Zoe Boehm series (only read the first one so far) to be on the safe side?