A botched root canal operation left a woman with hallucinations and migraines that she thought would kill her
Kara Edwards recently developed migraines, hallucinations, and stomach pain due to a tooth infection.
It turns out a botched root canal 15 years prior allowed an infection to spread to her sinuses.
If left untreated, tooth infections can cause problems throughout the body.
Kara Edwards was enjoying a short, scenic hike with her husband in spring 2021 when the trees started "running away" from her.
The couple was admiring the view at an overlook, and suddenly her vision seemed to pull back like a camera panning out, the 45-year-old, who's based in Dallas, shared on Twitter on Monday.
In a Twitter thread, Edwards said she had been experiencing daily migraines with visual distortions, which left her feeling exhausted and achy all over. Two years prior, she went to the emergency room for extreme abdominal pain, but she said she was sent home without a diagnosis. The hallucinations were new and would continue for months.
Edwards said she went for various medical consults between 2019 and 2022, but her brain and body scans came back clear. One doctor suggested she might be depressed, she said. All the while, she said she lost a concerning amount of weight and started getting her affairs in order.
"I felt so bad, I recorded a goodbye video to my family in my hotel room," she wrote on Twitter, recalling a weekend she spent away at a convention.
"At this point, I gave up. Told my husband that my body was fighting something and that it would likely kill me."
Finally, in February 2022, a toothache led Edwards to a doctor who identified the source of her symptoms.
An infection had been growing in her sinuses for years
Edwards said she thought it was strange when she started experiencing pain in a tooth she had surgery on about 15 years ago. She told Insider that she originally broke the tooth while eating popcorn and had a routine root canal around 2007.
In annual X-rays and regular cleanings since the surgery, Edwards said her dentist hadn't flagged any issues with the root canal. No one noticed anything out of the ordinary in her dental X-rays in 2022, either.
The next stop was an ear, nose, and throat specialist who suggested she might have a sinus infection. They did a facial CT scan, which can provide a more detailed picture of soft tissue compared to X-ray. At the end of the visit, another doctor looked at the scan and asked Edwards about her root canal.
In an image shared with Insider, an egg-shaped mass of tissue can be seen near the affected tooth. It turned out the root canal had been botched more than a decade ago, resulting in a large abscess that never healed.
A root canal is a procedure to remove the soft center, or pulp, of an infected tooth. The procedure can fail if not all of the infection is excised and the tooth becomes reinfected, according to the American Association of Endodontists.
Edwards told Insider that the endodontist who treated her had seen similar infections in the past, but never with so much affected tissue in the sinuses.
"My upper jaw bone warped around the abscess and into my sinuses," Edwards told Insider. "It literally changed the shape of my skull."
Edwards is sharing her medical mystery to help others
As Edwards sat processing her diagnosis, she said the doctor mentioned that he bet she had some awful headaches. That validation of her symptoms was enough to make her tear up, she said.
"I'll never believe my brain MRI didn't show a giant growing mass of reactive tissue in my face," she wrote in an email to Insider. "What I experienced speaks to a larger issue with our healthcare industry — as a woman, I was dismissed time and again."
Just four days after getting surgery to remove the abscess, Edwards said the fog that had shadowed the past two-plus years lifted.
She said she still has some tissue buildup in her sinuses and bone loss due to the infection. But she's only had three migraines in the two months since her surgery, so she considers herself "one of the lucky ones," she wrote in a tweet.
"If you've been experiencing unexplained symptoms and you feel you aren't being heard, I believe you. Don't give up," she wrote.
Read the original article on Insider
