In pain yet again

Today I’m a mess.  It’s hard to tell how much of that is emotional and how much physical.  After struggling with this all day though, I’m suspecting that it’s largely physical, because I haven’t had any significant success with relieving it.  It’s my teeth.  I feel utterly wrecked and vulnerable and in pain because my teeth hurt.  I ate a single gherkin last night, and the pain just hit.  It was awful, and nothing would make it stop.  There’s one tooth that gets horribly acid-sensitive from time to time.  It’s been drilled and filled twice, so I don’t know why it still hurts.  The rest of my teeth on that side hurt too, which makes me suspect I’ve been clenching my teeth in my sleep again.  And hopefully it will get better in a few days.  Meanwhile, I’m afraid to eat a thing. 

As for why I was presumably clenching my teeth so hard in my sleep, that’s another story I’ll save for when it has a happy ending.  Hopefully in a week or two.  I’ll just say I had a night I barely slept at all. 

Why, I want to know, is it that whenever I start to make some progress on a health issue, another bigger, badder one seems to just come up out of nowhere and slam me to the ground?  I feel like one of those dogs in the "learned helplessness" experiments.  What am I supposed to be doing? 

I think every health professional I’ve been to see is similarly perplexed.  I come in and they say, "no problem!  We can fix this, I’ve cured many patients of the same thing."  Then the date of their predicted cure approaches and they extend the date.  Then they say, "yours is one of the trickiest cases I’ve ever had.  What a challenge!"  And I start wondering if somehow it’s me that’s the problem. 

I’d just love to know what it’s all about.  It’s not like I’m just sitting around struggling through the days.  I looked over the last year and found at least fourteen different health problems I’d worked on, some without progress, some with a few leads, and a couple with an astonishing degree of success.  It’s a long list.  Perhaps looking after my health is my full-time occupation.  But why is it that despite success on a number of individual problems, overall it seems I’m getting nowhere?  Why does the universe (apparently) feel the need to slam me into the concrete every time I start to feel optimistic about my health?  That I really would love to know.  That I need to know.  And now.