like i said in my last post, my wisdom teeth were extracted on the 11th. unfortunatly, i am still in pain. my dentist said that day 2 and 3 would be my worst and that by day 4, i should be fine. i am not fine! i am in so much pain! last night, after rinsing my mouth with salt water, my mom looked in my mouth with a flashlight. she saw pockets of yellow infection. is this normal? i think it's gross, but that's not the point. i even thought that by now, i wouldn't be taking as much medication. wrong! i took 2 vicodin last night and it didn't even phase me. someone please help me! i have no idea what's wrong.

You need to get back to the doctor first thing in the morning.. you may have a dry socket if u took 2 painkillers and nothing happend..

hang in there!

nothing is wrong.
you are just 4 days past surgery! you are not gonna be completely out of pain.
if you ever had a canker sore on your lip, you'd know even that takes 2 weeks to heal while you suffer greatly in pain.

so nothing is wrong with what you are experiencing, post surgical pain is ineveitable.

The yellow colour doesn't always mean infection. Connective tissue looks whitish yellow and slimy when it is healing in gum tissue in your mouth. Two things would be happening if you had an infection: 1, you would have extremely foul breath. Ask your mom if she smelled anything yucky when she was looking in your mouth. Trust me, it's a strong smell and it smells bad - if you had infections she would have smelled it!. 2, the tissue surrounding the socket (not in or on the actual wound, but the healthy tissue around it) will be red and inflamed, not the nice healthy pink colour of the rest of your gums. So, if your healthy tissue isn't inflamed and you don't have horrible breath, then it's probably not infected.

You could however be developing a dry socket. I had three of my sockets go dry, but didn't know it, and they subsequently got infected. I was in pain for three weeks after my extractions. If it still hurts really bad after 6-7 days, go to the dentist and tell him/her to check for dry sockets. Ask your mom to look in the holes again and see if she sees anything inside them, or if they just look like gaping dark holes. You want to see gooey tissue in there - it means that it's healing. If there's no gooey stuff in there (white, yellow, red, whatever colour, just SOMETHING in there) then you might have a dry socket. If there is gooey stuff in there, then leave it alone, and let it heal.

Melanie

I think people tend to jump to the dry socket conclusion too quickly. Day 4 is not easy- I was still in tremendous pain at that point- and I also had some nasty looking yellowish stuff in there. I freaked out for days thinking I had a dry socket, but you know what it was? Just food stuck in there irritating the wound. And that's what caused my bad breath, too. So it's not always a complication that's to blame. In your follow-up visit the dentist should give you a syringe to give extra hydration to the wound. Just my personal experience. Good luck!

Jules, I don't think you would feel that way if you did in fact develop a dry socket! http://www.healthboards.com/ubb/tongue.gif Everyone who's had a wisdom tooth (or any tooth for that matter) extracted should know of the warning signs and symptoms associated with dry sockets, so that they can best handle their recovery. I didn't know what to look for and because of that, had an excruciatingly long 3 weeks of pain. Had I known, on day 4, that a dry socket was even a possibility, it never would have gotten as bad as it did. So if anyone thinks they have a dry socket, GO TO THE DENTIST. Better safe than sorry!

By the way, the dry sockets have also drastically slown down my healing time. I had my wisdom teeth removed on Feb 13 (over two months ago) and I still have deep holes where the dry sockets were (the tooth that didn't develop a dry socket is completely healed over). STILL!

Melanie


[This message has been edited by MelanieB (edited 04-19-2002).]

Thanx to all of you that replied. Turns out that I in fact did have a dry socket and that was what was causing me all my pain. Now I've just gotta heal! GRR!!!