Don't take your health for granted...

Yeah well... It's always fun to get phone calls from home. Today was no exception with my mom's fun news. Of course when I say fun... I don't really mean fun. I mean the kind of news that is hard to hear over the phone but you can't help it.

So... My brother is sick. That, while not exactly new, is still becoming more and more alarming for my mom.

You see... He has always had bad teeth. Teeth, you say? What do teeth have to do this? Well, lemme tell you. Alcohol + Smoking + previously bad teeth = even worse bad teeth. Silly but obvious, huh?

This past week he has been in so much pain that his face is swollen (one eye is swollen shut), he can't sleep, he has a fever and chills, he can hardly eat, and yeah...

His jaw is so infected that he will be having all of his teeth pulled. My brother is 27.

Of course, no one likes this option. It's expensive but since my brother no longer has insurance, my parents are paying for it (He's costing them a LOT of money, this plus all his court stuff). My brother also happens to like his particularly nasty teeth, but if doesn't get them all pulled and they remain infected, he could die.

Death is bad.

This sort of health problem has killed people before... the infection moves from the gums/jaw into the blood stream and kills the person. Most of the time its because the pain from the infection hurts the teeth so much that the doctors would pull the teeth. The infection would enter the blood and that's all she wrote.

So yeah... Dentures are not the worst outcome of this situation don't you think?

The thing is... he knew this already. He had a similar problem earlier in the year and had another dentist say that he'd like to remove all of my brother's teeth... so then he never went back to him. I guess you could say that we all knew this was comming. But it still is making my mom a nervous wreak. She is easily excitable, so medical issues put her on high alert...

Basically this Tuesday, our dentist (who looks like Donny Osmond, I swear!) will be removing as many teeth as he can at one time safely (so about 8-10 teeth). While my brother would have prefered it to happen sooner (he feels really awful), it isn't safe to perform dental work with his current infection. To fix that problem, the dentist gave him two extra strength antibiotics... which hopefully will work.


Now, I feel terrible about my brother cuz I don't want him to be feeling bad... but I can't help but hate how my mom likes to tell me very bad, very important news over the phone as a kind of "by the way..." That's not nice.