Re: Three rounds of antibiotics, root canal, and still i'm hurting... i am so worried 
help!
I didn't have surgery to fix my lingual nerve injury... the dentist refused to believe it at first, you know the usual "oh you just kept your mouth open for so long thats why its sore, it will go away... here's some ibuprofen" And then nearly a month later, they admitted that it was a lingual nerve injury but since I still had some feeling they didn't want to jump to surgery. I was not even referred to the oral surgeon at all. My personal thought is that the dentist didn't want to admit that he injured me. He did send me to physiotherapy though and they took me through various jaw exercises and used ultrasound on my joint from the outside to try an coax healing. And of course anti-inflammatories. All in all, it took the better part of 2 years before I had full feeling back and was 100% pain free. The emotional trauma from it was actually worse than the physical. After that point for a good many years I refused dental injections all together. Instead I would use nitrous oxide only... and have them crank it up enough that it blocked majority of the pain (or at least distracted me enough that I got through the drilling).
Anyway as my incident Friday just past was emergency, and all of a sudden, and the external civilian endodontist they sent me to did not use sedation at all... he was about to jam me full of needles right away fully conscious and if it was not for the fact that I had a prescription of oral sedation with me in my pocket, I would have got up and left and booked it for Monday instead so I could get a scrip for sedation. However oral sedation does not have any pain blocking effects like nitrous oxide does. It mainly just makes you forget about the appointment (it causes amnesia). So I lost the battle with the needles Friday. And to be honest the only part of the procedure I DO remember is the pokes. The needle hurt WAY more than I ever remember dental needles hurting! I don't know if its because they were right under my nose or not but wow it was painful! If I wasn't already experiencing the effects of the sedation I would have been in tears! That was my first clue that he hit the nerve. He also did a palate injection behind my front tooth... though it was intense for a second it actually wasn't as bad as the nose ones. And the palate one (nasopalatine block I think) didn't cause any significant post op soreness actually... which I am surprised about. But the nose shots actually hit a main nerve branch dead on and local anesthetic solution is actually toxic to nerves if injected directly into them. Plus since I can not have epinephrine due to an arrhythmia that causes my body to overreact to adrenaline, he likely used more of the solution that doesn't contain eli to make up for it... thus causing even more damage.
When I woke from the sedation 6 hrs later, I only remembered having the needles and nothing else.... but I was in horrible pain by that time. And the pain was not in the same place where the abcess pain had been. It was higher and more to the sides like where my gum meets my upper lip and in the corner by my nose. It was so tender I could not even touch my nose or any movement of my upper lip. The pain radiates from that point where the injections were, sideways across my whole upper jaw (like the entire main nerve branch that goes across all your upper teeth) was in terrible constant 10/10 pain. It also radiated to my sinus, below my eye and into my right nostril. It's now 4 days out and the pain is only marginally better but still severe. I did not lose any feeling this time, just outright pain. But I did lose the ability to move my right upper lip properly. I still can't move it. The dentist yesterday tried to reassure me that it's not noticeable unless I try to smile (then I look like I have had a stroke or something).
Problem is 99% of dentists will not admit that the needles can cause damage, or significant post op complications. Its less that they want to reassure you... and more that they just want you to be compliant so its easier for them to work on you.
As I said this is my second significant nerve injury from a dentist now. First one was same as you, on the bottom causing lingual nerve injury. Keep in mind I am not a dentist so I can't diagnose your issue but it certainly sounds like what I went through in my teens. The symptoms of lingual nerve injury are burning, pain, tingling in the affected side of the tongue, change of taste, parasthesia (numbness tingling), electric like shocks of pain in the jaw on the affected side. You can usually cause the shocks, tingling etc by opening your mouth widely or move side to side which would put stress on your lingual nerve. They get you to do these movements as tests when investigating lingual nerve injury.
I would not wait... I would let them know now. State your symptoms and be specific or they will try to say it's just lingering infection etc causing it. Stress the tongue symptoms to them as infection in your jaw should not really affect your tongue! The sooner they diagnose it, the sooner you can get treatment... even if it's just physiotherapy, or anti-inflammatories. There are also drugs that specifically target nerves and help with nerve pain and healing. So surgery is last ditch effort to repair the nerve. But sooner the better as I said, it can take a LONG time to recover from lingual nerve injury! Delayed treatment can sometimes even lead to the damage being permanent though its rare.
Well, this sounds exactly like what I have. I just looked up lingual nerve injury and seriously, it seems exactly right. Have you gotten any surgery or anything to fix it? Is there anything you've done to help the taste in your mouth? I'm having a hard time eating anything, which is really hard because I make dinner for my family and being so ill and nauseated just means that I don't want to make dinner any more. I can live with the pain to be honest, its that awful taste that I can't stand.
Any advice while I try and find a surgeon etc?
PS thank you so much for pointing this out, I think I would have gone on forever not knowing anything!!!! You really are a godsend!
