Miracle in My Mouth, Until...

One of my great medical gifts came a few years ago when a Michigan dentist I met online told me that a drop of Fluocinonide gel (0.05%) dabbed on a fledgling canker sore would get rid of it by the next day. I absolutely didn't believe him.

Those nasty little devils last for days, usually well over a week, sometimes nearly two. They get sore like a Bell curve so that if you get one on a Sunday, by Wednesday you don't want to eat anything that has any acid in it whatsoever, or anything at all, really, before they gradually ease off. Painful, cruel little mouth ulcers, they are.

I'd suffered from frequent multiple canker sores since childhood, at times as many as half a dozen at a time scattered throughout my mouth on my cheek walls, down where my lower gums met my inside lower lips, and even creeping toward the outer part of my lips that shows. Not like a cold sore -- cold sores can be "shared" with other people, whereas canker sores are not contagious, if that's the right word. But sore as hell. Anyone who's had them, especially frequently, knows how disruptive they can be to eating, talking, sleeping and just sitting. They pack a lot of pain into a couple of square millimeters.

Getting a doctor to prescribe the Fluocinonide for me was a challenge. It's approved for topical use only and inside the mouth isn't considered topical. But I convinced my local dentist at the time to let me try it.

Bliss!

It really sends those little nasties back from whence they came. If you put a little drop on the sore just as it's developing, and if you do it a few times a day, by the next morning it is really, truly gone. As if it never tried to exist. A miracle! (If you wait too long, until the canker sore has developed to be bigger than a pin prick, it's too late and it grows nearly as big and lasts nearly as long as usual. And don't get anything but the gel. The other forms just won't work the same and they taste medicinal, unlike the gel.)

That was a decade ago and I've made sure I don't run out of the miracle gel ever since. It takes me nearly a year to go through a 15g tube. The tubes as they are handled and jostled around in my purse tend to leak and I lose some from each tube. So I don't ingest enough for the steroids in it to do anything bad to me. At least as far as I know.

It hasn't been easy. I have had to argue with several doctors over the years to get them to prescribe it. "That's not what it's supposed to be for," they tell me. But I'm passionate about it, insistent that they trust me and give me that relief, and if they don't, I switch doctors. Any doctor who doesn't trust a person who knows their own body isn't worth keeping.

My canker sores tend to come in waves. Several will pop up one or two at a time for several weeks and then I'll be free of them for a month or two or more. I always have my handy gel with me to nip the little suckers in the bud so they don't blossom into anything. I'm so grateful for the Fluocinonide gel. It's eliminated an ongoing discomfort and helped my love life. (If I have to explain that, go read another blog.)

So...when my bleach for teeth made my mouth sore (see my previous blog entry, "The Price of Vanity") , much like it did when I first got braces in 9th grade, I turned to my old friend Fluocinonide.

Big mistake!

Apparently the bleaching gel and the steroid gel don't get along. They fought like siblings in my mouth, unbeknownst to me, and kept the fisticuffs up until my whole lower face was swollen like I've never experienced. I almost never react badly to drugs so I was thrown for a loop. I blamed the bleaching gel, or rather my ineptitude at keeping it within its little tray prison while in my mouth. But last night as the swelling was finally measurably subsiding, my mouth and lips were feeling a little raw so I put a light coating of Fluocinonide gel between my gums and my lips and even a little on my lips themselves. When I woke up at 4:00 a.m., I felt puffy-swollen again, even without the bleaching gel. I staggered to the mirror and was chagrined to see myself swelled up like I had balloons in my cheeks and neck and collagen-run-wild in my lips. Uuuuuuug-leeeeee!

That's when I got it. It wasn't either one of the gels that was the culprit, it was their chemical reaction when encountering each other.

So...I'm drinking a LOT of water today and now, mid-day, I look closer to my old self again. My jawline still looks a bit like a squirrel's but my top lip isn't fat-lip size anymore, which is a relief. When something like this happens, the fear is that it's not just simple swelling but that I'd permanently disfigured myself. I know, catastrophizing isn't productive, but those thoughts do charge through the mental gates of reason once in awhile.

No more gels of any kind for me for awhile. And no more medical tales here for awhile. That's what consumes a lot of people when they get old(er) and I'd hate for you to think that I'm in that category. Ahem.