Goddammit, Now My TMJ Has Come Back

The only time I tried snowboarding was late 2000, I believe.  I was such an idiot about it that I didn't even bring snowpants.  That's because I didn't have them.  Nor did I know much about snowboarding.  I tried skiing once while on a class trip, and I kept falling so much I started crying.  I didn't cry when I fell, oh, about 20 times that day.  Most of the time on my head.  Never again.

I soon began getting headaches, migraine-strength headaches that I had never felt before.  I thought they were due to the wisdom teeth I started to think to have taken out.  But when I went to the dentist, he told me it wasn't my teeth.  It was my Temporomandibular Joint (TMJ) that probably was knocked out of whack on one of my many crashes onto the snow.  I was told to take pain relievers while being assigned a physical therapist.  But I was temping at an architectural firm at the time, and I don't know if I could make the scheduled two or three days a week work, and the headaches were starting to go away, so on the eve of my first session, I canceled.

Well, by golly, for the first time since way back then, the pain in my TMJ (the pain is colloquially called "TMJ," but those who are in medicine describe it as "TMD" for Temporomandibular disorder ... a friend of mine from high school who became a surgeon told me this, adding that people who say "TMJ" is calling the problem by the body part, to which I want to say, "Who the fuck cares, the people in pain with this call this "TMJ, alright?") returned with a vengeance I have not felt since those headaches in the weeks after my aborted attempt at snowboarding.  It happened last night while watching NASCAR.  I was opening my jaw when I felt this sudden pain, like my jaw joint slipped drastically out of place, jutting out so that the end of the bone was bulging through my skin.  I was able to open up my jaw, but at great pain.  And it hasn't gone away.

The pain is on the right side.  I can open it up only so much before I encounter a lot of fucking pain and it feels as if my jaw is pushing out. If I force my jaw open all the way the pain subsides, but as I close it the feeling that my jaw's dislocated returns.  So does the pain, about halfway till about 75% of the way back to jaw close.  I also feel pain there if I bring my jaw forward; if I do that and then try to open it, the pain is there throughout.  There is also clicking and popping, but I've always heard that without the attending pain.

Well, that's fucking great.  What did I do?  Quick research shows that the effects of TMJ are in fact psychosomatic; traumatic or depressing events causes jaw pain.  Honestly, things have been pretty good lately.  I've been through much more traumatic and depressing things over the past baker's dozen years than what I'm going through (or not going through) now and my jaw's been fine.  I could use a massage, as I've been taught in places around my shoulder and head, but I don't think that could be the problem, could it?

Now I have to find the heat pack, which Mother may have thrown away.  I also have to dig around to see if she also threw away any pain medication, because I'll need that, too.  In the meantime I guess I have to not sit on the right side of my jaw and bang my posture back into shape.  But I just looked up TMJ disorder on Wikipedia and they have this chilling declaration:

Most sources now agree that no irreversible treatment should be carried out for TMD.

Well if that just ain't the tits.