My horror story, or 10 year nightmare, began in the fall of ‘92. President Clinton was about to win the candidacy and I had suddenly fell ill to sickness within my sinus bones that would wind up haunting me for the rest of my life.
It all first began in the winter of 1982, after the birth of my first child, that I suddenly began to suffer from endless sinus and ear infections and it seemed that no amount of antibiotics would make any of it go away. Out of desperation one night, I called this doctor, whose name had been mentioned to me in passing somewhere, that he was good with this type of thing and might be able to help me. Late one Sunday night, finally at the end of the rope, I called and he met me at the ER and soon we discovered that I had developed multiple allergies to many environmental things and it was assumed that this was the current problem. So I started on an anti-allergen regimen and cleaned house of dust and mold, got rid of my cat and my plants, and a serum, much like a vaccine was created for me, and I took this by injection about every week to every other week, and after about 8 months or so, I tapered off. Infections had finally cleared up some and I was doing much better but I was told I was left with some damage to my left maxillary sinus and would need a surgery, that back in those days was called a Caldwell-Luc procedure, to aid in the drainage of this affected sinus that had not been working properly while I was so sick. I went through the surgery and recovered rather quickly and was back to work in no time since I was only 21 then, very healthy and active, otherwise, and I never even needed the pain medication. This was what I percieved to be the end of this illness I had been suffering from for over a year and I did not think that anything else would ever again plague me in that area, since I was convinced that I had been cured. Well I was so wrong I was in for a serious and un-welcomed surprise in the fall of 1992. I had just moved into a very old, drafty house in the country and even though prior to moving in, much cleaning and dusting was done, to prevent allergy attacks from recurring, since I still got them occasionally. About a month after moving in, I awoke one morning with the most excruciating pain in the left side of my face, and swelling and unable to blow anything from that side of my nose and I was suddenly just devastatingly sick. I immediately contacted the ENT surgeon who had done the surgery back in 1982, and was seen immediately. Even he seemed shocked at the severity of this new infection. My entire left maxillary sinus was completely full of infection and swollen and painful and I literally could not open my jaw. This infection had infected not only the sinus, but the jawbone, and out into the tissues beneath my face and was beneath my cheeks in the form of cellulitis. I could not blow anything from that nostril and the pain was very intense. The doctor, unsure of just what had happened here, performed in his office, a minor, but very painful, surgical procedure called a sinus lavage and attempted to rinse this infected substance from my nose. He even had to perforate the buccal area of my mouth, just under the upper lip, along the gum line, with a very long needle and inserted it directly into the sinus to aspirate this strange substance to be sent to pathology to determine what kind of bacteria or cancer or whatever this might be. This perforation and aspiration was done almost every other day, while I continued to take every kind of antibiotic available from broad spectrum to fungal kinds to anaerobic bacterial types. Nothing seemed to be working at all and the infection was so deep into the bones of my sinus floor that my condition did not have a very good prognosis at this point. We finally hit on an antibiotic combination that seemed to begin clearing it up, but by now I was on so much stuff from decongestants to antibiotics and so by now it is March of 1994 and the nightmare isn’t over still. I am now facing more surgery, pain, and tremendous amounts of money being dumped into this, which by now, if I had only known better at the time, I would never have gone through with the root canals. I would have had those teeth extracted as well, and speaking futuristically, it would have been in my best interest, I just did not know it at the time. So I had the surgery first, where the oral surgeon went in while I was under anesthesia, and cut out the jaw tooth, the bones surrounding it, and basically did a cleanup job from the prior surgery, where he could see more scar tissue trying to develop and this “hole” that he called a “surgical defect” was like a constant open wound that oozed pus quite often, so he did the best he could to clean that disaster up and try to promote some healthy bone to begin healing. Afterwards, I had to see the dentist and prepare for the other 2 teeth to be root canaled. By summer of that year, ‘94, I was finally starting to see some kind of light at the end this infinite tunnel, but things still were not quite right. While the dentist was working on the 2 root canals, I appeared to be having problems still, within the alveolar bones that support the teeth, and I was still in constant pain. Now, as I mentioned earlier, the first operation had gone so well that I never took any narcotics. In fact, up until that fateful day just before that sinus surgery in the fall of ‘92, at age 31, I realized I had never taken a pain pill stronger than an aspirin, in my entire life. I had, in fact, been a pretty sheltered girl most of my life and did not drink or do drugs, had gone to nursing school back in the early ’80’s, but never finished to become a registered nurse, since life has a way of making you put aside your dreams temporarily while you deal with other things like having children and going through divorce and being forced to drop out of school for a while and work in doctor’s offices instead, until the time could be right.Here is how this drama began to unfold. I was very sick and I was getting very weak. I was 31 years old and had never taken pain pills before and did not want to. I was actually kind of scared of them, based on what I had learned in the pharmacology I studied in nursing school. But one day, that pain was bad, so bad that I felt like dying, that I just did not think there was any more strength left in me to fight it off and I had been given a few of these little speckled pills for pain to take if it ever got to the point where I needed it. Well I think I had long gone past that point months earlier and was finally at the breaking point. So I took out this pill, in a little blister pak, an obvious sample from the doctor, that I had been holding on to for quite a while. The day I decided to take it was not whimsical or anything like that. I planned to take it, but first I had to research it, since research is my thing and what I seem to do best, I had to know everything there was to know about this drug called “Lortab”, and before I swallowed this pill, I had to know exactly what to expect. I was that pill-phobic. So after my research, I took the pill and waited. About 15-20 minutes later, the course of my entire life had just changed. A complete 180 had taken place, and I did not even know it yet. All I knew at that particular moment, was that for the first time in years, I suddenly felt absolutely no pain at all. Apparently I had been in low grade pain for several years prior, and I just assumed it was a stress headache or sinus pressure and I figured I could live with it and go on, that this was just the way it was, and I really did not know anything different, until that day. That day, a whole different world that I had not seen, opened up to me and at the time, things looked and felt good, and I oblivious to what the future held at that time.
When the root canals were “supposedly” done, I still had pain in them, and the doctors did not believe me. They felt sure that everything had been corrected and by now I should be over the pain, but I wasn’t. They began to cut me of from pain medication and I still needed it, since they did not know it yet, but they still had not fixed the problem yet. I begged for the pills and sometimes I got them, and sometimes I did not, so I got tired of the whining and begging and being accused of being an addict. One day while standing in line at Kinkos copiers, a devious idea popped into my head. I did not need these doctors to call in the medicines for me or write more prescriptions. I had been to nursing school and I knew how to do it myself, so I did. And I did, and I did, and many months went by and I had stopped bugging the doctors, and I was still not quite right, my sinus had some kind of permanent defect now that needed alveoplastic surgery to correct, but no one knew at the time. I had given up on everyone and decided I would do things my way now. After a few months of playing doctor, and not even really realizing I was committing a felony, I started getting sloppy, and one day, that sloppiness caught the eye of a very sharp pharmacist who busted me right then and there. So now I was not only still sick, but facing jail? How much worse could things get? A lot worse. I was sentenced to probation, since it was my first time ever to break the law and I was never ordered to be in rehab, nor was I seeing any more doctors to try to solve the still existing sinus bone problem, that still hurt and made me do what I did in the first place. I tried for a few months to give the medicine up. I tried alternatives but there just wasn’t anything strong enough to fight it off. With time, I sort of learned to deal with it the best way I could, and occasionally I would get a script from a doctor to help with the pain, but it was mostly random, and started dealing with the pain at night by taking anything and everything available