A Dance With Dr Giggles

After my oral surgery yesterday, I will forever imagine the devil to be an elderly white man with cold blue eyes, a complete head of gray hair, coming at me with a needle and drill.  Yesterday , I plotted murder and suicide at the same time.  Yesterday, I had an apicoectomy.  An apicoectomy is a procedure that is done when a root canal goes bad or if there is an infected nerve of the tooth.  The cut your gums open and scrape out the infected area and shave down the bone and sometimes do a bone graft.  I imagine the only thing worse in life mouth wise than having to go through an apicoectomy would involve being  forced to give Kat Stacks head at gunpoint.

A Brief Background of What Lead to The Surgery.

First, thing first, it is a common misconception that anytime that someone has to get a root canal that they have "bad" or "rotten" teeth.  When it comes to the molars, this can definitely be the case, but my trouble tooth comes in the form of my front, right tooth, that had experienced a little too much trauma in life.  The tooth had been chipped twice and the third time my crown broke, my tooth was impacted, and I I had to have a root canal. The swelling went down for a year and there was no pain so naturally I thought all was good. WRONG.

( A smile like this should come with no complications.If you google apicoectomy the images will show horrid, rotted out mouths, not a pearly white smile. I just was unfortunate enough to have my tooth respond badly to impact. )

About five days ago, I started feeling the dull aching in my tooth. I freaked out and ran to the bathroom and checked all around. No swelling, no redness, I had followed my healing instructions to the letter, I didn't understand.  I scheduled an appointment for Thursday.  By the time Thursday rolled around, I was in immense pain and my dentist referred me to a specialist for what he described to be "A simple procedure.  I had developed as cyst at the root and needed to have it removed. "They are just going to numb you up and just drain the infection and you'll be good to go" he told me. Considering that the root canal didn't bother me much at all, I had him schedule an emergency appointment for the next morning for me to have the procedure performed.

The next 24 hours were filled with me overdosing on Lortab and Nikki trying to comfort me while I sobbed and considered ripping my tooth out with my bare hands.  I didn't understand how I could leave the dentist feeling worse than when I came in.

I could have just taken the tooth out myself and rocked the above look 24/7. 

So, Friday morning rolls around, and I go to the specialist's office feeling tired, weak, hungry, and dizzy from the myriad of pain killers and I had been ingesting with little to no food over the past few days.

From the moment the specialist came into the room, I felt uneasy.  He was an older man with full head of gray hair, and there was no compassion in his eyes.  He took xrays and told me that we were going to numb the tooth and go in and get everything started.  He proceeded to shoot 15 shots into the inflamed nerve on my tooth. DIRECTLY. IN TO. THE. FUCKING NERVE!!!! His assistant placed a vibrating tool against it to distract me from the pain, but all it did was annoy  me while the pain rocked through my entire face and spread throughout my body to my toes.  I was sobbing and hyperventilating but somehow managed to keep my mouth open for him to continue inflicting his special brand on agony on me.

I didn't go numb right away.  In fact, for the next 15 minutes, I felt my tooth throbbing through my blood stream as I sat in his office, howling like Madea , my body shaking uncontrollably.  The assistant came back in to check on me, and told me that I was actually taking it better than most.

"I've seen grown men break down and just all out scream," she told me.   "Women tend to have a higher threshold for pain.  This is one of the most painful procedures you will ever go through in life, it you can do this, you can do anything."

Gee thanks, I thought. Way to make me feel better about my impending pain, by reinforcing the fact that this may be one of the most terrible experiences ever in life.  I sent the following tweets while waiting for the pain to subside.

So my gray haired purveyor of pain returns to make me face my fear.   He looked me dead in my eyes and lied to me when he said "The shots were the worst part , from this point on you should only feel pressure."  Through my tear soaked hazy vision I think I saw a hint of a smile in those cold eyes of his, was he taking pleasure in his lies, did he get off on my pain?

I should have remembered when I heard the word "pressure" , that it was doctor speak for "the most intense pain and i'm lying to you so that you won't feel overly apprehensive about it".  When I dislocated my shoulder before the doctor put it back in place when I was 17, he said "pressure" and I damned near passed out from the pain.

I can't tell you exactly how long the procedure lasted, I don't know how to measure time in pain.  All I know is that he cut up my gum, drained out any infection, shaved down my bone, gave me another shot into my nerve, did a bone graft, and put stitches in my gums.  I remember crying out, hyperventilating, my legs and feet locking up, my toes curling, feeling like my heart was going to explode, feeling like the right side of my brain was going to burst.

Random Thoughts during the procedure:

FUCK!

WHY ME!!!!!

HE SAID IT WOULDN'T HURT!!!!

I WANT  STEWIE!!!!!

MAYBE IF I TAKE THE NEEDLE AND SHOVE IT IN HIS THROAT I CAN MAKE A BREAK FOR IT!!!!

A WHITE LIGHT? YES!! I'M GOING TO THE LIGHT!!! NO MORE PAIN!!!

CAN'T THEY JUST TAKE IT OUT?? THE HILLBILLY LOOK IS MAKING A COMEBACK??

I WANT TO DIE.

MAYBE IF I GRAB THE DRILL AND SMASH HIM ACROSS THE FACE WITH IT I CAN MAKE A BREAK FOR IT!!!

MY HEART IS BEATING SO FAST, AM I HAVING A HEART ATTACK? NOT LIKE THIS, NOT IN THE DENTIST'S CHAIR.

And it ended.  Well, he stopped hurting me , but my pain didn't end.  There was an intense throbbing on the right side of my face from the procedure, but I did notice that the pain from the toothache was gone.  This, I could handle.  I had stopped audibly sobbing, but tears were still streaming down my face.

He pulled his bloody gloves off and had the nerve to smile at me. "I imagine you felt some discomfort there.  When the nerve is inflamed like that it is all but impossible to get you all the way numb.  It sometimes can cause the infection to become a bit more inflamed."

I uttered some intelligible, guttural sound from my swollen mouth which in my mind sounded like, "Fuck you, you pompous old fucker.  You could have told me what to expect.  You could have put me under," but I had neither the energy, nor physical ability to form even a word on Souljah Boy's vocabulary level.  I was a woman defeated.  I wanted nothing but my bed, and ice pack, and my pain meds.

I think what sucked the most was his lack of caring.  He was cold and calculating, and it seemed as if over the years he had become impervious to the pain of his patients.  I'd like to imagine in my spare time that he participates in activities like this.

I'm in the healing process, my face is still swollen, and the stitches hurt, but the pain for the inflamed root is gone, so I guess it was worth it.

Posted in: The World According To Bliss

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