My dentist saved my life.
It's true.
The last few years have been rough, moving across country, adjusting to a new culture, a new career, and working with students who exhibit extreme negative behaviors due to adverse childhood experiences. I have suffered with depression for a really long time, possibly since my teenage years, but in the fall, I took a nosedive.
Actually, when I was thinking about this earlier today, I realized that I was really struggling badly the summer of 2018, and felt emotionally unbalanced. I visited Ohio that summer for my cousin Shane's wedding, and when I was staying with Mark, he encouraged me to seek therapy.
I attributed my depression mostly to secondary trauma from working with my students. Christmas of 2018, I cried off and on worrying about one of my students in particular whose parents/family never told him they love him, and he haunted me as I watched my nieces open their presents, knowing that they (thankfully) will never experience the kind of trauma or unsafe environment that most of my students grow up with.
So another 9 months goes by and last September, I was really just down. I should mention here that in the Spring of 2019, I did see a therapist about once a month, and while it helped a little, it was difficult for me to see her. Her office was pretty far from the school, and it just took a lot out of me to get out there to do it. I was having an even harder time managing my emotions--luckily not in front of my students--but just about everywhere else. I broke down in a co-teacher training when the special ed director basically said we needed to do 900 million different things, all at once, and I told her "This district has made it impossible for me to do a good job. I can only do a mediocre job," and she literally said to me, "It's not impossible (to do a good job), it's just really hard." I had to leave the room because I was so upset. Talk about taking any hope that things could get better somehow. I called to try to see my therapist, but by this time, she was pregnant and not seeing as many clients.
At that particular time, we also had a few classrooms that had personalities together that just tested every ounce of my patience. One class in particular consisted of 14 kids who had been together since 6th grade (this was my 3rd year with them), and they just refused to cooperate with anything I tried to do. After two years of having dealt with this, and facing 9 more months of it, I just reached a breaking point. Again, still crying at home, outside of when the students were with me, but angry crying a lot of the time. An example of behavior that just was pushing me to my tipping point: three boys 10-20 minutes late daily, knock on my door loudly like they're members of the bomb squad, causing everyone in the room to jump in their seats. Spoke to them individually, collectively. Spoke to their parents, spoke to admin, the students would not stop. If I had been in a better frame of mine, I may have been able to ignore it, but I did not like the way it made my classroom feel like an unsafe place.
I stopped sleeping. Just as the insomnia began, my parents came to visit. I had not seen them since May, and my mom started pointing out "You don't talk about your kids like this, I've never heard you so unhappy with teaching up to this point." Insert concerned Mama Lou face here. Then three, maybe four of my co-workers told me to go to the doctor about the insomnia, and my mom pushed as well.
So I made an appointment with the nurse practitioner for just after we held the fall iteration of parent/teacher conferences. I filled out a questionnaire about depression, and rated pretty high. One area I should mention that I do not struggle with is suicidal ideation. I have met too many people who have been affected by relatives who have committed suicide, and I could never hurt my family, friends, or students in that way. I realize that depression ebbs and flows in a cycle for me, and always has, and that things do get better.
After talking to Laurie CNP for about fifteen minutes, she wrote me for two weeks off of work. I made necessary calls, drove home nervous that my mom would be upset that I would be off for two weeks, but instead, she was relieved. She said, "Someone finally listened to you."
Maybe 2-3 weeks before I went on leave, I happened to catch my co-teacher in the lounge on our floor watching chiropractor videos, and I mentioned in passing that I used to see one for my TMJ in Akron, but hadn't found one here yet. She said, "TMJ? My dentist specializes in that." I got his name, and put his number in my phone and left it at that, until I had 2 weeks off.
I called and made an appointment with him for a TMJ consult as well as a badly needed cleaning. Before I could see him, though, I had another appointment with Laurie, CNP, and was not doing any better. I was so anxious about returning to work that I was shaky and crying again, so she wrote me off until after Thanksgiving break.
So I drove out to Indio to see Frank Hernandez, DDS, and the girl who roomed me gave me a booklet about TMJ dysfunction. When people say they have TMJ, we all have TMJ. TMJ stands for Temperomandibular joint. It's basically where the two bones that make up the jawbone meet. It is the only joint in the body that moves from left to right and up and down. So if you are having jaw pain, popping, etc, you have TMJ dysfunction, not just TMJ.
My buddy Frank has a lot of theories about how important this joint is. One of the many theories is that when you look at how a fetus develops, the strands of DNA for the jawbone are one of the first to implant on the cells, which he thinks implies a significance that is largely ignored. Another of his theories is that when we get arthritis in this joint (which is what causes the dysfunction), it causes a variety of issues, including joint pain elsewhere.
In my particular case, I have been clenching my teeth ever since I can remember. Over time, that caused arthritis in my jaw joint, and therefore pain. I could pop my jaw almost every time I opened my mouth. I gave up on chewing gum years ago. There were mornings I could barely open my mouth initially and had to massage and force my jaw open with a painful crack to go with it.
Now, I know what you're thinking: "Why didn't she just get a mouth guard?" Oh, well, I had one. I had one made by a dentist in Akron who told me that because it was made of acrylic, my teeth wouldn't like the feeling and therefore wouldn't close on the guard. Guess what? My teeth adapted. I may have even been clenching harder due to the plastic.
From the below photo image, (which I took from this website) https://support.clearcorrect.com/hc/en-us/articles/208571127-TMJ-Temporomandibular-Joint-TMD-Temporomandibular-Disorder-, you can see how your jaw joints should come together, which is to say, it should have some space and a little padding between your bottom jaw and the top. My CT Scan showed that both sides of my jaw joint were even worse than that lower picture. My left jaw joint had pretty much curved up into the socket, with very little space.
The last few years have been rough, moving across country, adjusting to a new culture, a new career, and working with students who exhibit extreme negative behaviors due to adverse childhood experiences. I have suffered with depression for a really long time, possibly since my teenage years, but in the fall, I took a nosedive.
Actually, when I was thinking about this earlier today, I realized that I was really struggling badly the summer of 2018, and felt emotionally unbalanced. I visited Ohio that summer for my cousin Shane's wedding, and when I was staying with Mark, he encouraged me to seek therapy.
I attributed my depression mostly to secondary trauma from working with my students. Christmas of 2018, I cried off and on worrying about one of my students in particular whose parents/family never told him they love him, and he haunted me as I watched my nieces open their presents, knowing that they (thankfully) will never experience the kind of trauma or unsafe environment that most of my students grow up with.
So another 9 months goes by and last September, I was really just down. I should mention here that in the Spring of 2019, I did see a therapist about once a month, and while it helped a little, it was difficult for me to see her. Her office was pretty far from the school, and it just took a lot out of me to get out there to do it. I was having an even harder time managing my emotions--luckily not in front of my students--but just about everywhere else. I broke down in a co-teacher training when the special ed director basically said we needed to do 900 million different things, all at once, and I told her "This district has made it impossible for me to do a good job. I can only do a mediocre job," and she literally said to me, "It's not impossible (to do a good job), it's just really hard." I had to leave the room because I was so upset. Talk about taking any hope that things could get better somehow. I called to try to see my therapist, but by this time, she was pregnant and not seeing as many clients.
At that particular time, we also had a few classrooms that had personalities together that just tested every ounce of my patience. One class in particular consisted of 14 kids who had been together since 6th grade (this was my 3rd year with them), and they just refused to cooperate with anything I tried to do. After two years of having dealt with this, and facing 9 more months of it, I just reached a breaking point. Again, still crying at home, outside of when the students were with me, but angry crying a lot of the time. An example of behavior that just was pushing me to my tipping point: three boys 10-20 minutes late daily, knock on my door loudly like they're members of the bomb squad, causing everyone in the room to jump in their seats. Spoke to them individually, collectively. Spoke to their parents, spoke to admin, the students would not stop. If I had been in a better frame of mine, I may have been able to ignore it, but I did not like the way it made my classroom feel like an unsafe place.
I stopped sleeping. Just as the insomnia began, my parents came to visit. I had not seen them since May, and my mom started pointing out "You don't talk about your kids like this, I've never heard you so unhappy with teaching up to this point." Insert concerned Mama Lou face here. Then three, maybe four of my co-workers told me to go to the doctor about the insomnia, and my mom pushed as well.
So I made an appointment with the nurse practitioner for just after we held the fall iteration of parent/teacher conferences. I filled out a questionnaire about depression, and rated pretty high. One area I should mention that I do not struggle with is suicidal ideation. I have met too many people who have been affected by relatives who have committed suicide, and I could never hurt my family, friends, or students in that way. I realize that depression ebbs and flows in a cycle for me, and always has, and that things do get better.
After talking to Laurie CNP for about fifteen minutes, she wrote me for two weeks off of work. I made necessary calls, drove home nervous that my mom would be upset that I would be off for two weeks, but instead, she was relieved. She said, "Someone finally listened to you."
Maybe 2-3 weeks before I went on leave, I happened to catch my co-teacher in the lounge on our floor watching chiropractor videos, and I mentioned in passing that I used to see one for my TMJ in Akron, but hadn't found one here yet. She said, "TMJ? My dentist specializes in that." I got his name, and put his number in my phone and left it at that, until I had 2 weeks off.
I called and made an appointment with him for a TMJ consult as well as a badly needed cleaning. Before I could see him, though, I had another appointment with Laurie, CNP, and was not doing any better. I was so anxious about returning to work that I was shaky and crying again, so she wrote me off until after Thanksgiving break.
So I drove out to Indio to see Frank Hernandez, DDS, and the girl who roomed me gave me a booklet about TMJ dysfunction. When people say they have TMJ, we all have TMJ. TMJ stands for Temperomandibular joint. It's basically where the two bones that make up the jawbone meet. It is the only joint in the body that moves from left to right and up and down. So if you are having jaw pain, popping, etc, you have TMJ dysfunction, not just TMJ.
My buddy Frank has a lot of theories about how important this joint is. One of the many theories is that when you look at how a fetus develops, the strands of DNA for the jawbone are one of the first to implant on the cells, which he thinks implies a significance that is largely ignored. Another of his theories is that when we get arthritis in this joint (which is what causes the dysfunction), it causes a variety of issues, including joint pain elsewhere.
In my particular case, I have been clenching my teeth ever since I can remember. Over time, that caused arthritis in my jaw joint, and therefore pain. I could pop my jaw almost every time I opened my mouth. I gave up on chewing gum years ago. There were mornings I could barely open my mouth initially and had to massage and force my jaw open with a painful crack to go with it.
Now, I know what you're thinking: "Why didn't she just get a mouth guard?" Oh, well, I had one. I had one made by a dentist in Akron who told me that because it was made of acrylic, my teeth wouldn't like the feeling and therefore wouldn't close on the guard. Guess what? My teeth adapted. I may have even been clenching harder due to the plastic.
From the below photo image, (which I took from this website) https://support.clearcorrect.com/hc/en-us/articles/208571127-TMJ-Temporomandibular-Joint-TMD-Temporomandibular-Disorder-, you can see how your jaw joints should come together, which is to say, it should have some space and a little padding between your bottom jaw and the top. My CT Scan showed that both sides of my jaw joint were even worse than that lower picture. My left jaw joint had pretty much curved up into the socket, with very little space.
Before I continue, I should mention that unfortunately, the testing involved with TMJ Dysfunction is STILL not covered by insurance, medical or dental. Medical says it's a dental problem and dental says it's a medical problem. I say that's a bunch of ..... well, never mind.
Some symptoms you would easily guess are headaches, face pain, popping of the jaw bone, clicking of the jaw bone, and others you wouldn't really associate with this issue like nausea, dizziness, gum disease, loss of hearing (you should see how close my jaw bone is/was to my ear canal), and you guessed it---depression, anxiety, and insomnia. I can't find the pamphlet he gave me, but there were more symptoms than this.
Frank explained too that because I was in so much pain, my neurotransmitters were doing everything to block as much as it could, which led to several issues like the depression, but it also pushed my head off of my neck. Biologically my body decided, "Well, her jaw hurts, let's push her head forward so that gravity pulls that jaw bone down." Only, that's not how it works. It just throws your whole skeleton crooked and causes more issues. The head weighs 8 pounds if it's sitting on your neck appropriately, and like 40 pounds if it's not, so I also had neck/shoulder pain and poor range of motion.
I underwent CT Scans, a ECG scan that measured the sound my jaw makes doing the different movements. Frank did a trigger point pain test, which made me realize how much pain had been blocked, even while my face felt tension/pain all day. Every trigger point on my head, neck, inside my mouth was severe. One in the back of my mouth about brought me off of the chair. The night of these tests, I awoke around 3am to the worst spasms in my face and head that I had ever experienced, and it made me wonder if that's what my neurotransmitters had been blocking.
Remember that badly needed tooth cleaning? Yeah, well, it also turned out that since I hadn't been to the dentist since 2014-ish, I had 5-6 cavities, and gum disease to boot. The gum disease was bad enough that I had to undergo deep cleaning, and because my jaw hurt so much, even with using a bite block, I had to do the deep cleaning and the fillings in 1/4 increments. So 4 different visits with the pain of numbing etc, to suffer through. Since I was still off on mental health leave, there was a week where I did two parts of my mouth in two consecutive days, and the second day got to be too much and I lost it in the middle of the filling process. Hernandez and his staff were very understanding. I should also mention that I had traumatic experiences when I went through orthodontia as a kid, so dentist chairs are not my favorite.
So the key to really "fixing" the issue with TMJ dysfunction is to create space between the jaw bones. To do this, Hernandez has a special mouth splint that he has made that sits on my bottom teeth during the day, and a different splint that covers my upper teeth at night. The space created by the splints means that my jaw does not get caught on itself.
Hernandez knew something about this process because he went through it in order to come up with this treatment plan. He shared with me that he reached a depressed state and had such terrible migraines that he would lay in his office with the lights off between patients, and his staff would have to come in to get him in order to work on his patients. After being prescribed narcotic drugs for the pain, he sought the advice of an orthopedic surgeon, as well as other specialists, and this is what he/they came up with for treatment. He wears a splint himself every day.
It took about a week for my splint to come back from wherever it is made, and within two days, I had no facial tension or pain. I slept better. My mood improved vastly, in fact, he had to warn me that I had to be careful not to overdo things because of the euphoria from being released from that pain. I, of course, over did things anyway--which just meant I wore myself out.
Within four weeks, one of the balance tests that measure neurological function of the upper body was already normalized without wearing the splint, meaning that I had healed somewhat. He also directed me to a chiropractor to work on getting my neck back into the correct place, which I am still working on.
It is no joke that my dentist saved my life. I may not have had suicidal thoughts that involved a plan, but I was miserable enough that my life was not a life anyone wants, and looking back, I do think some of my friendships that I made when I first moved here were severely impacted by my roller coaster emotions and the depression. I definitely lost friends from it.
That all happened back in November, and when I went back to see Laurie, CNP to release me back to work, she was shocked at the change in my personality from when she'd met me two months prior. She applauded me for finding a solution to my depression, though she wondered why I hadn't mentioned that I was having that amount of face pain. I told her, "I already had a mouth guard, and thought that was all that could help me. It just turned out to be the wrong mouth guard." I did not want to live on narcotic drugs for that amount of pain, and since the medical people always turn you to dental for TMJ dysfunction, it never occurred to me to mention it to her.
There are a few things that have happened since this life-altering season of my life. First, mom met with Dr. Hernandez and he told me that he thought he could help her with her joint problems. She and dad talked it over and she decided to get splints, and her balance is much better than it was. Second, I am relearning who I am without being depressed all the time. I have more energy. I do not cry at the drop of a hat anymore. The students who I have had for 3 years noticed a huge change in me, largely that I had more energy to deal with their behaviors quickly, rather than putting consequences off like I was. I had parents of students mention how different I am--less stressed in appearance, and the Canadians that are here during "the season" all noticed a difference in the way I look. I must have had a really pinched looking face before. (haha) Even Frank commented on how changed I am from that very first visit when I was at my worst with the depression.
I feel really good. I'm unrecognizable to myself some days, and I am still getting used to that, even six months later. I will likely have to wear these splints the rest of my life, but it is worth it to me to feel this way.
So that's it. My dentist saved my life.
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