TMJ is like a knife in the ear

With all the crazy stressful things happening lately… planning the wedding, dealing with immigration, moving back to Seattle, navigating a plethora of txtGroups issues, handling old Morpheus tax issues and debt, filing personal taxes… having it all come down at once put me into a teeth grinding spree. Even as I type this I notice my jaw clenching up.

Well yesterday my jaw joint gave up. I was chewing on something and all of a sudden I heard a very faint course grinding noise… but that was nothing compared to the searing sharp pain I got in my left ear. My left TMJ joint waved the white flag and since then I haven’t been able to chew anything.

So, I went to the pharmacy and picked up some osteoporosis supplements that are supposed to be good for the joints (Glucosamine, Chondroitin, MSM, and Hyaluronic Acid) . After taking 3 of them and heading to bed, something happened because I woke up this morning with my left ear swollen shut. In fact, the whole area around the joint was swollen, puffing out the whole side of my head around my ear. But, on the plus side, there was no more acute pain when I attempted to very lightly chew some of the chunks in my breakfast soup.

For now I’m just going to focus on recovery by taking the supplements and reducing stress. With all this stuff going on, I found its much easier to compartmentialize everything and just pick one thing to focus on and let the other stuff go while you’re working on that one thing. Having the big picture playing on the mental canvas the whole day does nothing to help you relax or to get things done. As long as you take a very small amount of time each day to prioritize things, that’s all you need to do as far as the big picture is concerned. Once in a while you might want to spend a good chunk of time dwelling on the big picture, making sure everything is progressing as it should be, but don’t be concerned with everything all the time… you’ll end up with a swollen face.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 12th, 2007 at 10:40 am and is filed under Life in general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.