Resistant to local anesthetic?
Another thread about pain got me to thinking about this and I am wondering if anyone else has had similar experiences.
Six or seven years back, I was injured while working in a beverage distributor's warehouse. A piece of glass went through my booth and into my foot. The injury was pretty nasty. When I pulled the wound open to have a look, a stream of blood spurted like four feet out of the cut. I must have hit a minor artery or something. Anyway, the next morning my foot hurt so bad that I drove myself to the emergency room to have it taken care of (I was in so much pain that I had to push the pedals with my left foot - it hurt too much to use my right). When the doctor finally came in, he told me he was going to apply an anesthetic and then try and dig the glass out. I was face down on one of those doctor's chair/bed things, so I couldn't see what he was doing, but I felt a horrible pain in my foot (as if I had been stabbed) and he said he'd be back in a few minutes to give my foot time to get numb. When he comes back, he asks me if I can feel "this", and he pokes at my foot. It hurts and I tell him so. He goes away for a few more minutes and repeats the test when he returns. I can still feel pain and he asks if it's really pain or just pressure. I tell him it's pain and he says - these are his exact words - "We didn't numb you up at all, did we?" The doctor then proceeds to go digging around in my foot and it hurts so bad I want to scream and punch his fucking lights out.
OK, that's story one. Story two is about a tooth I had pulled. The dentist takes out her torture device syringe and gives me a shot of whatever -caine it is they use (lidocaine?). After a few minutes, I tell her I'm not numb and she gives me another shot. This goes on for a while and eventually my jaw does get numb but the dentist must have given me six damn shots of the stuff before it worked. I was starting to wonder if she was even allowed to use that much of the stuff in one sitting.
I am wondering if anyone else has this problem with being resistant to numbing or if it's even possible to be resistant to a local anesthetic. One thing I know for sure is that when the doctor was fucking around with my foot, it <B>hurt</B>; it was not just pressure. The foot experience can't be easily dismissed as psychosomatic because I couldn't even see him and if I was numb I wouldn't have known when he was messing with my foot.
Also, for anyone who hasn't been given a shot at the dentist, here's a fun fact: the needle is approximately as large as a tree trunk and you actually hear a crunching noise as it is pushed into the tendon at the back of your jaw.
SpaceAce
|