For real, though, sometimes you can ignore tooth pain and it’ll go away (kinda). I was getting really bad tooth pain when I was in grad school without any sort of meaningful health insurance, so I kept putting off going to the dentist and eventually the pain went away.

Fast forward 5 years when I finally get a job with dental coverage and I go in for a cleaning. They find out that one of my fillings has come loose (on the tooth that had the pain 5 years earlier) and they remove it and start to redrill. All of a sudden the dentist starts swearing and tells me that he “hit a pocket of infected pus and it started spraying out like an oil well,” and it has likely been there since my toothache stopped. Turns out, if you ignore a bad infection long enough, the nerve in the tooth just dies and it doesn’t hurt anymore!

One particularly nasty 5.5-hour root canal later, my teeth are better, but that was an experience I don’t particularly care to repeat.