OT

Interesting morning I’ve had. Last week, my general dentist (a “company” dental “store”) left in a part of a tooth root when extracting a tooth, so this morning I had an appointment with an oral surgeon to get that piece out. There was also another tooth that needed extraction (I’m working on getting a partial), so the oral surgeon did the other extraction too.

My general dentist is about 75 years old and very old school, gentle, careful, a bit slow, and comforting. Well, this oral surgeon (same “company,” different office) I went to must have just come off the battlefield or something. The whole two procedures took under 20 minutes.

He swabbed my gums with a topical anesthetic, and within 30 seconds, he was in there with the needles to shoot in the local anesthetic. He barely gave the topical any time to take effect. And he used a total of 5 needles of anesthetic. I think by the time he was done shooting this stuff into my mouth, my naval was numb. And working fast? He had the root and the other tooth out in about 10 minutes. And that included two stitches in the gum where the tooth root was buried.

My head and mouth feels like a truck ran over them. And he shoved so much gauze up into my mouth, that I scared myself when I looked in the mirror in the car. It was a Joker smile all the way.

As I was walking through Safeway to get to the pharmacy, I was scaring people with this Joker face that was dripping blood into a napkin I had in my hand. I finally pulled out the gauze and wrapped it all in a napkin and put it in my pocket. It was better than walking around and looking like a psychotic comic book character.

And my whole jaw and mouth is useless right now. I took two Vicoden about an hour ago, and I was wondering why I didn’t feel anything. Well, a few minutes ago I found the tablets stuck to my upper denture. My pitiful attempt to swallow them with a little water didn’t work, and I’m so numb that I didn’t even realize that they hadn’t gone down and they were stuck to the roof of my mouth.

I finally got the medicine past my mouth. I feel good now.