Skip to main content

More Fallout from my Bike Wreck

There's a lot of talk now about how factors besides genes and current diet affect health and weight: the health of your mother when you were a fetus, your diet as a child, stress, and environment. Another is wear and tear.

A few years ago when I fell off my bike and broke a tooth and knocked two others out of place, my dentist said that the two knocked out of place would likely need a root canal someday because of the injury. It could be two weeks, it could be two years, he said. Now, nearly three years later, the canine that was injured is abscessed. 

Between being lethargic (doing nothing but watching Netflix when I got home), wearing my winter coat when everyone else was in shirtsleeves, and having an odd appetite (I've been living mostly on Quest bars this past month), I should have known I was sick. But I have a high threshold of pain. Finally, my face swelled up Friday morning and I made an appointment with my oral surgeon--the one who did my dental implant and gum graft. I didn't know what was wrong, but I saw him because the swelling was in the area of the implant and because I have a lot more confidence in dentists than in doctors. An x-ray showed bone loss around the root of the canine, meaning it's infected. 

Starting a course of antibiotics has perked me up so much that I've been moving large rose bushes today and feeling pretty good. Oddly, I'm in pain only at night, when my TMJ flares up. I'm wondering if TMJ is partly caused by swollen gums. It could be that low-carb diets help aches and pains in general because inflammation and water retention go down, meaning everything is less swollen and less sensitive. 

In any case, diet helps--the teeth where I had a slight cavity a few months ago are feeling better. But diet isn't everything.
Labels:

Comments

tess said…
our steadily-accrued injuries and infections throughout life make an impact, i'm convinced of it! :-( hope you feel "all better" soon!
April 12, 2015
Lori Miller said…
Thanks, Tess.
April 12, 2015
Lori Miller said…
This comment has been removed by the author.
April 12, 2015
Galina L. said…
I am watching your implant adventure closely because I now have three implants myself. It is very possible that having a foreign body inside living tissues will always keep a small compromised area which is prone to infections, and may be the inflammation started when you had too much stress. So far I would rather have implants than dentures anyway. May be it could be reasonable to have the state of implants checked after an evidence that your body had a period of compromised immunity (like having a flu).
April 12, 2015
Lori Miller said…
The tooth with the implant is fine--it's the tooth next to it that's infected. If the implant were infected and there was bone loss, I'd be in big trouble because the implant is embedded in the bone.

My oral surgeon said that implants and the teeth next to them should, as you say, be watched carefully for that reason.
April 12, 2015
Lowcarb team member said…
I think any accident ... bad fall ... broken limb etc. as we all get older can have a certain impact. We can all eat wisely, keep ourselves as fit as possible, which helps our bodies and general health. But alas we are still open to tooth infections, bacterial infections etc and a course of antibiotics is needed. Hope you feel a lot better soon and the coming week is a good one for you.

Take Care and .....

All the best Jan
April 12, 2015
Lori Miller said…
That's true--there's no such thing as perfect health and people suffered mightily before antibiotics came along.

I'm a bit tired from all my hard work yesterday, but my face is less swollen.
April 12, 2015
Unknown said…
If not already,please try moderate dose vitamin K-2 of the MK-7 isomer. moderate being 200-500 mcg. This gem of a nutrient affects many things... bone, tooth, and arterial or vein, which about covers your situation
April 13, 2015
Lori Miller said…
I agree, Robert--I've been taking it for years.
April 13, 2015
Val said…
As my friend commented to me a while back: "The bounce is GONE!!!"
Good luck Lori, I hope your abscess clears up uneventfully...
April 15, 2015
Lori Miller said…
There's definitely less pep in my step and glide in my stride.
April 15, 2015
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Black Friday Deals for Good Health

Here are some great Black Friday deals--all ONLINE--that can benefit your health. I've used most of these products and vendors and recommend them. I'm not an affiliate.  Vitamins iHerb.com is having a 25% off Black Friday and Cyber Monday site-wide sale. Vitacost.com is offering $10 off $50, stackable with a variety of other deals. Tried and True Supplements I use: Doctor's Best magnesium ( peach powder , unflavored powder , and tablets ) Country Life kelp tablets Solgar zinc, 22 mg NOW vitamin D, 5,000 IU NOW astaxanthin, 4 mg Jarrow hyaluronic acid, 120 mg Solaray vitamin C tablets, 485 mg Collagen Powder, Dips, Dressings, Mayo and Sauces Primal Kitchen products--all made without added sugar or Frankenfoods--are on sale. If you remember Mark Sisson from the Mark's Daily Apple blog, Primal Kitchen is his company. PrimalKitchen.com  (25% off this week only) iHerb.com  (25% off) Vitacost.com (20% off) I love their vanilla, peanut butter and chocolate-mint collagen pow...
Post a Comment
Read more

Carrageenan: A Sickening Thickener. Is it a Migraine Menace?

Let me tell you about my ride in an ambulance last night. I woke up at six o'clock from a nap with a mild headache. I ate dinner and took my vitamins, along with a couple of extra magnesium pills. Since magnesium helps my TMJ flare-ups, I thought it might help my headache. Then I went to see my mother. A few hours later, I had a severe headache, sinus pain and nausea. During a brief respite from the pain, I left for home, but less than a mile later, I got out of my car and threw up. A cop, Officer Fisher, pulled up behind me and asked if I was okay. He believed me when he said I hadn't been drinking, but he said I seemed lethargic and he wanted the paramedics to see me. (Later he mentioned that a man he'd recently stopped was having a stroke.) Thinking I had a migraine headache, the paramedics wanted to take me to the hospital. But since I knew that doctors don't know what causes migraine headaches, and I didn't know what effect their medicine would have on m...
15 comments
Read more

1972: Carole King, M*A*S*H and...Food for 2014?

I feel well enough to try Atkins induction again. The palpitations are gone, even without taking potassium. My energy level is back to normal--no more trucking on the treadmill early in the morning  to burn off nervous energy or emergency meat, cheese and mineral water stops after yoga. It's back to lounging around to Chopin and Debussy in the morning and stopping at the wine bar for pleasure. I'm using the original Atkins book: Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution from 1972. While looking in the book for a way to make gelatin (which is allowed on induction, but Jello(TM) and products like it have questionable ingredients), I felt the earth move under my feet : those recipes from 42 years ago look delicious and they're mostly real food. It makes sense, though: the cooks who wrote the recipes probably didn't have had a palette used to low-fat food full of added sugar or a bag of tricks to make low-fat food edible. Anyone who writes a recipe called "Cottage Cheese and...
21 comments
Read more

In Defense of Fast Food

Another modern trend - healthy food should be expensive, not nutrients-dense and preferably exotic, or you would be eating like plebs who live on a dollar McD menu. --Galina L. I don't try to jump over seven-foot hurdles, I look for one-foot hurdles I can step over. --Warren Buffett, pleb who eats at McDonald's Despite all the talk about wild-caught v. farmed, grass-fed v. CAFO and the vilification of fast food, a lot of us plebs benefit simply from carbohydrate restriction. But even though diabetes and obesity are rampant, and carb restriction alone would help millions of people, the impression is out there that you need to eat in a very specific way, far beyond just watching the carbs. Following a low-carb diet is already a high hurdle for many people. If some people want or need to raise the bar for themselves, that's fine with me, but there's no need to turn low-carb into a hurdle that a lot of people can't jump over. Organic produce and grass-fed or p...
17 comments
Read more

Decongestant Ineffective; Vibration Plate Works

A common ingredient in many cold medicines has been shown so ineffective that the FDA recently proposed taking it off the market. The ingredient, phenylephrine, "failed to outperform placebo pills in patients with cold and allergy congestion," say researchers from the University of Florida. "The same researchers also challenged the drug's effectiveness in 2007, but the FDA allowed the products to remain on the market pending additional research," according to CNBC .  Mostly placebos. Photo from Pixabay . I can attest that phenylephrine doesn't work. Before I stopped eating wheat, I constantly had nasal and sinus congestion. I helped keep Sudafed in business when the active ingredient was pseudoephedrine, but I noticed the PE (phenylephrine) variety didn't work at all. The only other decongestants I've found helpful are guaifenesin (Mucinex) and spicy food. Mucinex is expensive because it works! (The cheaper store brands work just as well, though.) Su...
Post a Comment
Read more