wisdom tooth: a tale of woe

I know you people revel in my disasters. I'm all like oooh blood and guts and hot glue and fall leaves and everybody hears HJINJKS and CIRCUS OF FUNNY. So okay. I got a wisdom tooth out. You love it.

I actually had 2 procedures scheduled, getting a permanent crown put on #30 and then having a  surgical extraction on #16. I got some kind of junior dentist for the first part. One of the primary problems with junior dentists is that they don't tell you what's going on, they just cram a gloved hand in your mouth and start hammering away at stuff. Then they take it back out and do some other stuff and then cram it back in, right in the middle of your instagramming. Another alarming thing about junior dentists is their tendency to wander off and leave you for unspecified amounts of time, and then when they come back they always explain how the real dentist said they need to do something different so, CRAM GAG FLOSS SCRAPE DRILL ESCAPE. Once the first step was done, they hooked me up to the laughing gas and put an anesthetic swab on the wrong side of my mouth. "That's the wrong side," I thought, after a moment.  "Or IS IT? Because I am HIGH." The real dentist came in and was pretty eye-rolly with the junior dentist about anesthetizing the wrong side, and I was both amused by the smackdown and horrified that the proper side was un-numb.

I stayed under the nitrous for an excessive amount of time. Side note: you guys are hilarious under the influence. Finally the real dentist came and I hit play on the ol iPod, and Randy Travis got in half a verse before the tooth was out and the whole shebang was over.

The junior dentist gave me a stern lecture about dry sockets and chips and cokes and anything that brings joy in this life: verboten. His second lecture was about pain management. "Don't wait too long," he warned me. "Take the pain meds right away, because when it hits you won't see colors anymore, and every day will be a nightmare that does not end." It was something like that, anyway.

I, being a rule follower, came home and took the meds and then couldn't find anything to eat that would not be on my forbidden list so I just drank some milk and went to bed, where I stayed until I started shaking and sweating and crawled down the stairs to be rescued by the MOG and eventually, to puke a lot. Good times. HIJINKS! I'm still pretty queasy today, despite skipping pain meds since then... or maybe because of skipping the pain meds.

It's amazing, the suffering that a small hole in your mouth can cause. When I get to heaven, Imma go hang out with Job and I'll be like, "I know exactly how you feel."