With my myriad of health problems there's no way to point at the infection for this or that, too complicated. But if you have a big nasty abscess on your gums it's definitely infected! Never felt any pain because that tooth was broken at age 7, had a root canal at age 12 - dentist first picked it up during a routine x-ray, then took more x-rays during my second cleaning to confirm. And the gum irritation from the scraping/cleaning has made the abscess swell into a huge bulge - it was not like that before, I would have noticed it, now it's in danger of rupture - not even going to type what can happen if that occurs, too horrible to think of! Thank god I managed to snag an emergency appt. with that holistic dentist tomorrow at noon for treatment - acupuncturist almost lost a patient last year to complications from the exact same thing.
Edit: one thing you can do is monitor your temperature 1st thing in morning last thing at night - I've had a low level fever off on for the 2+ yrs the tooth has been infected, we just never knew what was causing it because it came and went depending on the stress on my immune system was under from other things at the time.