Down and Up again

It's been a painful 9 days since I last posted. The ulcers caused by my lower brace rapidly grew to humdinger proportions and triggered off others to develop all over my tongue and mouth (i'm susceptible to them when stressed or under the weather), by Friday the pain was excruciating! Eating was terrible, speaking painful and garbled, and sleeping difficult as I was continually woken up by the throbbing. I spent the weekend doing very little other than applying various ulcer treatments every hour or so and moaning about my terrible misfortunes. By Sunday evening, however the pain finally started to subside and the ulcers began to slowly retreat, beaten back by continual applications of Clorhexidine, Adcortyl in Orabase, TCB, Anbesol and salty mouth washes. Please god don't ever make me go through that again! I always knew that wearing braces meant a certain amount of pain and discomfort, but any more episodes like that and I'll be banging on Dr H's doors begging him to put me out of my misery and take them off, which would really be a disaster. I'm praying it doesn't have to come to that.

So with the ulcers dying away I am once again looking forward to my favourite part of Christmas - EATING! Don't think i'll have to avoid indulging, just take it a bit slower and more carefully, which is probably no bad thing given the masses of stodgy foods on offer. Also sensing that there could be a lot of advantages to be gained out of brace wearing, e.g. "Do you mind if I don't help with the washing up? Eating dinner has given me TERRIBLE tooth pain and I really need to go and lie down" or "I'll have the last of the brandy cream as this pudding will be too firm for me to eat otherwise" and might even try "I'M the one who's suffering around here, so should really get to choose what we watch on telly". May aswell make the most of any sympathy :)

PS - I've put up a few of my pre-brace pictures but am really not happy with the format. Want to put up a gallery so I can show proper before/after shots and progress pics, currently working out the best way of doing this. Watch this space...