Just call me Toothless Joe

Despite my fears of waking up during surgery (which happened to a friend of mine) or the aneasthetic not working (which happened to my mom once), I survived the wisdom teeth-ectomy without incident. When I sat down in the chair at the dental surgen's office they put a gas mask on my nose, which I expected to emit happy gas, but didn't. It didn't seem to emit anything and made it imposible to exhale through my nose. While I was getting used to my new breathing aparatous, the nurse strapped (?!!) my wrists to the chair and put a heart rate monitor on my index finger. I'm not quite sure the point of the wrist straps. Do they have an ongoing problem with people attempting to flee mid-surgery, a scalple dangling from their mouth? Probably not, since the straps were the gentle, velcro kind, but still. It made me wonder. It took a little trying for the dental surgen to find a vein on the back of my wrist, which is also weird, because I can see them right now just for looking. But then, I don't have an expensive dental surgery degree, so what do I know.

Once the needle was in there I started to feel it real quick. The surgen told me something about how I didn't have to worry about keeping my mouth open, but I don't recall much of it. I do remember, just as I started to drift off, that my mother had made me promise to get his assurance that he would get all the bits of the teeth (apparently her own inept dentist had left the roots in on one of her wisdom teeth and they became infected), and so I seem to have said as much in my last moments of consciousness.

Only I didn't go unconscious. I didn't feel anything or even seem to have a sense of my physical body, but I could hear the surgen and nurse talking. Sometimes they were talking about the procedure, sometimes they were talking about who was taking a day off next week. But that's all very sketchy, too. However, I do know that when the operation was over, I didn't have a feeling of being woken up, simply of being moved from the chair and helped onto a recovery bench outside the dental surgen's inner sanctum. Mr. Broccoli was asked to come in and he says that my face lit up like the sun when I saw him. Although I was woozy, at the same time my mind was perfectly clear. I listened to the nurse's instructions about post-op care with complete understanding, which was totally different from the hazy absorbtion of conversation I'd experienced during the procedure itself.

I didn't realize how I looked until the nurse was taking me downstairs to meet Mr Broccoli who had gone to bring the car around. I looked at myself in the elevator mirror and would have laughted if such action had been physically possible. But it wasn't. My whole head was completely frozen, my mouth gapping open and I wouldn't have known it if I hadn't seen it. I couldn't even grunt. The only things I could move were my eyes, but they were crossed. My left eye looked straight ahead while my right eye looked directly to the left, so that as we drove home it constantly looked like we were about to turn into oncoming traffic. But I was too stoned to be terribly bothered by this. The rest of Thursday was spent eating apple sauce and being fascinated by my face as it slowly thawed. The last part to thaw was my lower lip and jaw, like the mouth of a ventriloquist dummy, which finally regained feeling at around 8:30 that night.

At 10:30 the pain set in. Luckily this was also bedtime (it's surprising how tiring surgery is when you're not even the one performing it!) so I took a couple of Tylonol 3s and hopped into bed. Then I woke up in the middle of the night in pain and had to take a couple more. Friday was just a day of pain, lying on the couch (when I eventually forced myself out of bed because I hate staying in bed all day) staring at the TV, counting down until I could take more Tyolenol. The T3s took a long time to kick in, never lasted very long, and made me woozy, but they were all I had and I lived by the count of 3 hours (the length of time the bottle says you have to wait between doses) for 2 straight days. :) Mr. Broccoli was as helpful as he could be, but short of knocking me out with a hammer there really wasn't anything anyone could do. He did go to the store and buy me a can of every kind of cream of something soup in the place, as well as some fresh fruit and bananas to make smoothies. Smoothies are joy!

By Sunday I had sworn off the T3s and had the energy to leave the house for a brief trip to the mall. I had also attempted to eat some solid food, although everyting had to be cut into tiny pieces because I couldn't open my mouth any wider than a half inch between my teeth. I looked like a chipmunk who had met Mohammed Ali in a dark alley, with a huge swollen bruise on my left cheek. Mr. Broccoli made the occational wife abuse joke until I cautioned him that someone overhearing might take him seriously and rush my off to Ernestine's.

I still have some pain off and on, but I'm mostly healed now. All the stitches have dissolved (and sometimes been accidentally swallowed!) and my bruise is just a small triangle of greenish yellow running from the left corner of my mouth to just under my chin. I do have a hard spot left where the swelling was that feels like someone imbedded the roller ball from a computer mouse under my cheek. Today has been the most pain-free day yet and I'm hoping to get a full night's sleep tonight (I haven't had a pill-free sleep yet this week). In closing, I don't recommend the experience as a whole, and I'm glad they took all 4 because I sure wouldn't ever want to go through with this again.