Bad habits like jaw-clenching and tooth-grinding aggravate the joint. Lots of people have pain there, the dentist added. That joint and the many attached muscles make speech and facial expressions possible. It’s most likely TMJ, the dentist concluded - temporomandibular joint pain. The only tenderness was in the joint where the jaw attached to the skull. He went to his dentist, who poked and prodded. Eating anything more solid than mashed potatoes triggered excruciating pain. Opening and closing his mouth, and especially chewing, made his jaw throb. The pain in his jaw started a couple of days later. Bizarre as this was, he most likely would have soon forgotten about it except that it happened again the next night - and just about every night since. He couldn’t even brush his hair on the right side of his head. When he awoke the next morning, the headache was gone, but the regions around his head and face where the pressure had been strongest felt strangely tender. It started as a headache that woke him from a dead sleep, a squeezing pressure deep inside his brain.
These strange pains had been tormenting the man for nearly three weeks. “We’re going to go to urgent care,” she said as she handed him a towel. He was a good swimmer what was wrong? She saw his lips move and leaned closer.
He struggled to the side of the pool and hung on, his breath ragged through involuntarily clenched teeth. He couldn’t breathe he could barely move. For a moment he was paralyzed - first with pain, then with fear. As he was turning his head to take a breath, an octopus of pain wrapped around the right side of his skull, starting at the joint where the jaw connects and slamming across his face and head with tentacles of squeezing agony. The 66-year-old man had just started his third lap at the community swimming pool outside Poughkeepsie, N.Y., when it struck.