Greetings, net-denizens…  Haven’t had an update for a while, so I thought I’d pop in for a quick info-dump.

Just had three wisdom teeth removed on Friday, which was quite the experience.  All four of my wisdom teeth were deemed impacted; however one of them had already grown into such a position that it wouldn’t bother the other teeth… I guess there was just extra room to grow since many of the teeth on my bottom row are overlapping and gave it extra space.  Additionally I have an impacted K-9 tooth (incisor?)… you know, the pointy ones!  Well I’ve always wondered why one of those teeth (the on on the top left… my left that is) was still a baby tooth.  Turns out, that the adult tooth tried to come in, but missed its mark and slipped, causing it to continue growing in at an angle.  The dentist informed me that an oral surgeon could potentially go in and wrap a wire around the tooth and somehow pull it down into the slot that the baby tooth occupies now, but I’m not so sure that she sold me on that explanation.  Perhaps I’ll let it hang out above all my other teeth where it will be permanently safe from cavities… I’ll consider it a spare tooth in case I ever need it.

As far as the procedure on Friday went, it wasn’t all too bad.  They gassed me up for about 45 minutes before starting the procedure, and then gave me 5 shots of Novocaine on each side of my mouth before starting.  Needless to say, all their tugging and sawing and wiggling did little to elicit any more than a giggle out of me.  Yet today I feel so much pain.

The top wisdom teeth came out easily.  I felt them pulling my skull to the left, and then the right, and then back a few times until a sudden tremendous release of pressure in the frontal face region occurred, signifying the successful tooth removal.  After the second tooth was removed the dentist exclaimed, “My what monster roots you have!”, before showing me the bloody mess of a molar that she had just removed from my upper left row of teeth.  It was actually quite amazing, because the roots appeared to be two inches long; however I was severely drugged at this point and can’t quite relay the sensation of seeing a gigantic tooth with intact roots covered in my blood a few inches from my face with two doctor-types staring down at me as my eyes stare in wonderment into the ether.  Needless-to-say I lacked the necessary mental capacity to take an accurate mental measurement of the size of the roots… But I digress.

Finally the time had come, for the bottom wisdom tooth.  The one that the dentist had forewarned me about.  She had mentioned something about it being harder to take out because it was up against the jaw bone.  Some mumbo-jumbo about sawing and cracking… I’m really glad I didn’t pay attention the first time she explained it because what actually happened was a horrendous trip into the land of sounds and feelings that will haunt your dreams forever.

Basically, the had to grind a tiny bit of jaw bone away behind the tooth… just enough to let them crack the tooth in half, vertically.  When they finally cracked the tooth and snapped the rear portion off it sounded like somebody had snapped a wooden pencil in half inside my mouth.  I felt the sensation of something breaking throughout the entire left half of my head.  The nitrous gas that I had been sucking on was sufficient to make me not really care that something had just snapped and broken inside of my face, but unfortunately I’ll never forget the sound that it made.  You’d think that the hardest part was watching somebody try to break something inside of your mouth and then subsequently feeling it happen; however you’d be wrong.  The worst part just so happened to come next.  As it turns out, when you’re trying to remove something and you break a big part of that something off… the remainder of what you were trying to remove gets ever HARDER to get out.  Have you ever broken the head of a rusty nail off when trying to pry it out of an old piece of wood?  Well imagine that but bloodier.

I don’t know how many times the metal tools that the doctor was using slipped off of my broken tooth and stabbed my gums or pierced my cheek, but I do know that when she finally was able to pull the remaining tooth shards out, my eyes were rolling into the back of my head from the noise of bone tearing from flesh.  Sensitive flesh that had been tenderized by stainless steel dentistry tools.  The same flesh that was now to be sutured-up and then pressurized by a roll of gauze.

It is now four days later.  I had a fantastic weekend, as the love of my life and future wife came to take care of me.  Even after bowls of ice cream and jello jigglers all weekend long, I’m still in tremendous pain.  The pain medication that I received does little more than allow me to sleep with the pain.  Every morning I wake up and my jaw feels like it’s been sat on by an elephant all night.  As the day progresses, the pain eases slightly but the area remains sensitive.  I go on Friday to get my sutures out; but it’s Monday and I’m already out of pain medication.  This makes me a sad panda.  I also went camping last weekend and I have spider bites on my hand that are blistered and looking pretty bad.  They’re not so bad as to worry, but that doesn’t mean they’re not irritating.  I’m a mess.