This is what Wisdom Looks Like
May 14, 2005
When I came home at noon with a bloody tooth in my pocket and hole in my jaw, my heart was still beating frantically and my lips were dry and swollen. And I was smiling.
The dentist jammed needles into my gum twice while I read the Canadian Gardening magazine in his office. Reading about onions made me glib and didn’t help the freezing solution set in.
“Judging by the way you’re talking, you still need more freeze,” he said.
“So I have to lose all coherence?”
“That’s right. When you’re slobbering all over yourself and slurring your words we’re good to go.”
“Are you just going to yank out my tooth, or is there more finesse to it?”
“God, don’t talk like that. You’ll scare my next patient — I don’t want to run after him through the parking lot,” he said injecting more liquid into my gums. “He’s here to have three teeth yanked out. Around here we don’t yank teeth — we extract them.”
“Umm. Right.”
And then there was a struggle. He yanked my tooth, which came out of my jaw with an almost audible plop. My heart was racing and my breath was rugged after the struggle. I didn’t feel any pain, just a faint flush of excitement as though I just finished having sex for the first time.
He gave me my tooth in a paper envelope.
I thanked him. “I won’t put it back,” I said.
In the end, my wisdom tooth extraction wasn’t as traumatic as I expected — I heard some horror stories of people eating mashed potatoes for weeks. The gum infection I had a little while ago was far more devastating. Today my jaw is slightly sore and I will eat steak for dinner.
Posted by Tudor at 03:40 PM in Various Positions | TrackBackThings get considerably more messy when they have to break parts of your jaw to get all four of them out.
But yes, on the [w]hole, I found the preceding jaw infection which triggered the extraction much more grueling than the aftermath of the surgery itself.
Posted by: Trevor on May 14, 2005 at 03:35 PMI was lucky because only one came out and my dentist didn’t break my jaw to fetch the fragment of root that broke in my jaw.
And those jaw infections — holy fucking shit! Pain to the max.
Posted by: Tudor on May 14, 2005 at 03:43 PMMan, I’ve had so many oral surgeries and the wisdom teeth hurt the most for me- even worse than when they dug a tooth out of the roof of my mouth and attached a hook and chain to it - I could do nothing but moan for the first day - but it might have been b/c it was all four and they had to be dug out from deep places behind molars.
I sculpted (I think my screaming head sculpture) while recovering. Even though you’re not in pain, let’s sculpt and eat steak - or make sculptures out of steak!
Posted by: Laura on May 14, 2005 at 03:48 PMDang, which dentist do you go to? Most people say that it’s a hell of an experience, but that sounds nice and easy.
Posted by: PD on May 14, 2005 at 04:40 PMit was nice and easy probably because I have weird wisdom teeth. my top two wisdom teeth never grew and the ones that did sprout were not attached to the nerves at all. no nerves, no pain.
Kinda perverse, isn’t it?
Posted by: Tudor on May 14, 2005 at 05:07 PMI hate you you painless bastard!
I’m still dealing with a sore jaw two weeks later, and my experience has been apparently a “good” one considering. Some people are in bed and starving for weeks, living on jello.
impacted wisdom teeth are much worse to get out, especially all four at once. I want to kick you so that you can share in my beautiful pain. Won’t you come over so I can kick you ?
Posted by: sherry on May 14, 2005 at 05:14 PMUgh… even reading about needles and getting teeth pulled out makes me uneasy.
I found jaw surgery much worse than wisdom teeth. Or maybe I mean to say that Codine is worse than Tylenol Three. No, there was definitely more pain associated with my jaw surgery as well.
The best part about drugs is that if you see crappy movies you won’t remember them and if you see good movies you can watch them again and they’ll seem new. I’m not sure how you’re supposed to remember which ones are good or bad though.
And you don’t just eat jello, you get to drink milkshakes and eat blended meals. Yum.
Posted by: David Alexander on May 14, 2005 at 06:19 PMSherry, please kick me — I don’t have any nerves in the rest of my body either. And I can’t believe people are starving in bed for weeks — pussies!
sorry about jaw surgery, Dave. they gave me no Codine, and crappy movies are still crappy. if sherry kicks me in the right place I may finally understand what you’ve been through.
Posted by: Tudor on May 14, 2005 at 10:22 PM