What Happened Today (2321 words)

People have told me of their experiences getting their wisdom teeth out, with various details embellished to reflect each unique experience. And "unique experience" is a good descriptor.

My story started this morning at 10:30, when I walked into the doctor's waiting room early for my surgery. I made myself known to the woman behind the glass and took a seat. I cracked open a book and started reading: I'm just to the first good part of H. P. Lovecraft's Call of Cthulhu. About half an hour later, the door opens and Ann walks me to a chair.

Time to sign the waiver. The waiver is unnecessarily doom-and-gloom. "I, the undersigned, hereby acknowledge that I have been informed that my jaw will lock up, nerves will be severed, and there is a non-zero chance my penis will fall off, and I will not hold Dr. Smith liable for any of the aforementioned events." Initialed and signed. I twiddled my thumbs some more.

Doctors' offices are always like catacombs to me. The hallways are narrow, and there are about eight other MDs sharing the floor, but there is still space for sixteen rooms and it always amazes me. Unfortunately for his administrative staff, the doctor's receptionists have to compress up to three women into a space the size of a passenger plane's overhead compartment. Plus patient files, plus computers, plus this, plus that. God bless 'em.

In one of these other rooms, a woman is talking to an earlier patient. "Time to wake up. There you go. No, don't go back to sleep. Take a deep breath. All right. What's your nickname? I've probably been mispronouncing your name all morning. I'm so sorry!"

The doctor comes in, checks my pano X-ray, and gives me a rundown: I'm scheduled to get all four wisdom teeth pulled. He tells me that he's going to remove one upper and one lower on the same side, and, judging the difficulty of doing so, will determine mid-procedure whether to go ahead and remove the other two. "Which are you going to remove first," I ask, "the lefts or the rights?" He tells me he always removes the right ones first.

This is good news, since the only tooth that I have personally felt broken the gumline is one on the right. It occasionally cuts into the soft tissue on my cheek, and let me tell you it is not a fun feeling. Topical analgesics help, but out-and-out extraction is the kind of once-and-for-all solution that gives me a hard-on. He tries to be subtle about it, but I notice that he has flipped the X-ray around. He was looking at it backwards. ("Backwards" is a relative term, since my right side is never going to be his right side. Unless he's going to be sitting behind me when he does the surgery, in which case what's the number of a good malpractice firm again?)

After a few more minutes, Ann leads me back through the tiny hallway and gestures with her voice as to the next room I should enter. Instead of asking for clarification, I just assume that the room with the anesthesiologist in it is the one she's talking about. Ann introduces me briefly to Kim, or I should instead call her "Fucking Awesome Kim", or perhaps "She of the Painkillers". Kim gets me seated and situated. With a BP cuff on my arm and a pulse monitor clipped to my right index finger, I ask her if she wants to tape down the loose grey cord that is otherwise going to pull the clip right off my hand. "You've done this before, haven't you?" she asks. I inform her that I have enjoyed the occasional medical drama. She already has a lengthy strip of that translucent medical tape in her hand. The cord is promptly taped to my hand and stays put.

She asks me about my asthma, something that I am required to tell medical professionals about, even though it almost never affects me anymore. "I had it since I was three, but it went away when I hit puberty. I only get the occasional attack [some people call them episodes] when I exert myself, or when exacerbated by an allergy, or, since living in Cleveland, on very foggy days." I neglect to play the smartass by adding that research indicates asthmatics who develop symptoms before age 5 tend to relapse around age 40. That is not information pertinent to the surgery. Pre-emptively, she gives me an Albuterol inhaler and tells me that I "know what to do." Two hits later, my lungs are feeling fantastic. "Wow!" I exclaim. "Yeah, it's good stuff." I add: "Primo." She laughs. "You like it? It's from Hawaii. This is that Maui Wowwee." I trust that I am in good hands at this point.

After that, I get the nose mask. "First, I'm just going to give you some oxygen." She told me she was going to bleed some nitrous oxide into the O₂, but she never told me when. "I want you to tell me when you start to feel funky," she said. Worried that laughing gas is going to be all I'm getting, I ask her if I am, as requested, going to be put completely under for the procedure. "Yes. Oh, don't worry. This is just Phase One." Ahhh. My left hand has "tiny veins", so I spent some time wearing a half-assed SCUBA getup while a women hung my hand over the arm of a chair and slapped it a few times.

Somewhere, that's probably somebody's fetish.

"I'm not feeling funky," I say, "but I am starting to feel relaxed." She feels my hands. "Hands are cold and clammy," she tells me. "They were like that before I walked in here!" I warn. "You've never had a major surgery before, then?" "I broke my arm once in second grade." "What did you do?" "Jumped off a slide." "Ah. Did you go to surgery for it?" "No." "Then it doesn't count then." Later on, I remember the incident, and I remember being wheeled into an operating room. I was looking up at the big array of lights and my leg would not stop shaking. Someone threw a blanket over me and the next thing I remember I was in a hospital bed. Sorry I lied, Kim. If it's any consolation, it was, for me, the worst summer ever.

Then an IV went in, and it was quite possibly the least disturbing needle that I've ever had inserted into my body. Kim was a pro. Or maybe the NO₂ was kicking in. If it was, I could not feel it. "What's going in me?" "I'm going to give you a narcotic. First some Fentanyl, then some Versed. This is Phase Two." I take it in for a few moments, telling Kim a short story. "A friend of mine had her wisdom teeth out a few weeks ago. She said that as soon as they put the IV in, someone told her 'You'll be out in a couple of seconds.'" "Heh. Didn't work, did it?" "Quite the opposite. Out like a light." "Wow."

At that point, I started feeling funky.

"OK, I'm starting to feel funky." "That's what I like to hear," she said. "And it didn't take as much as I thought it would."

The next thing I remember, I was laying on my back and hearing someone talk to Erica (Champ that she was, she had been waiting for me in the waiting room the entire time). Tears were sluicing down my face and I had some sort of paper towel sticking out of my mouth. My eyes could not focus. Fortunately, Erica knows enough American Sign Language to follow the Rochester Method.

T-I-S-S-U-E. T-I-S-S-U-E. T-I-S-S-U-E. I must have signed it a half a dozen times. Eventually I got one. Erica's a good guesser. When she guessed a letter incorrectly, I hit her. The light was too much. I had taken out my wallet and waved a couple of bills at Erica. I knew we would need parking money, and I wanted to give her enough before I left the waiting room, but sure enough it slipped my mind. So I had decided to do it now, rather than in the garage with a growing stream of cars waiting behind us. My wallet was much lighter than I remember it being before I went into surgery. "You already gave me money for parking," she tells me. I had woken up two minutes earlier, so I don't see how I could have. Nonetheless, I trust her. People coming out of a drug-induced slumber do funny things.

Someone comes in and pulls the wad of tissue out of my mouth. I see some red on it and suddenly realize that my tongue is tender, dry, and the size of a Subaru. The wallet, empty, goes over my eyes as a makeshift sleep mask. I don't know where I am, how I got here, or how long I've been here.

I sign Erica other questions. "Where am I? What time is it? Did they get all four? Did you get your L5R character done while you were waiting for me?" Some I ask repeatedly. Some get answers. At one point, the doctor drops in and says something I don't remember. The words "hall of famer" were used, and not in a good way. (It was later explained to me that my wisdom teeth were deep and small and not an easy thing to extract. Joy.) Later, I try to get up. Erica stops me. I lay back down for a few.

Later, I start to get up again, and Ann arrives to give me an ice pack and the litany of handling my meds. Whoops. Looks like you shouldn't explain a two-tier med schedule to a guy who just fuckin' came out of general anaesthesia. Erica gets the gist and we bail out of there. I feel like I want to throw up. Not that I'm going to, just that I want to. Ann has ordered me to drink some soda as soon as I get home.

Let's be clear about this. A soft drink has just been prescribed for treatment of a symptom. This is news, folks: Dr. Pepper is medicine. I knew it!

We get home. As we walk through the door, the phone is ringing. It's the doctor's office. We forgot to checkout. You know, like, pay for the Vicodin. Whoops. I don't remember leaving. I remember reaching for my coat, and then later on leaning against the wall waiting for the elevator. Erica gives them my credit card number over the phone. The local has worn off, and I'm feeling some pain.

Let's take a moment to discuss the pain of wisdom tooth extraction. Common sense tells us that getting a big hard lump of tissue removed from your jaw would sting with a sharp, cutting sensation. What you really get is aching, most of it from the process of a guy with way more schooling than you having to stretch your mouth open for two hours whilst finessing a dozen tools or more around inside a cavity smaller than your fist. I was in pain, and not in the strong, stabbing, violins-from-Psycho kind of way. It was just an ache, but it was an ache in three places and it was flat out pissing me off. How could I get to sleep with this? It wasn't a hurt. It was a distraction. I couldn't open the Vicodin. "Save that for sundown," Ann warned. I pop two Advil instead and go to bed. It's about 2:30 PM. When the ice pack stops working, I fall asleep.

Erica wakes me for a pill. Gotta take 'em with food. I ask for ice cream, and pick at it in a way I haven't ignored food since I gave up my asthma medication-induced anorexia. (There was one time in high school when I fell in love and couldn't eat for two months, but that's rather tangential.) Eventually, I get the whole bowl down. Erica tells me that ice cream isn't a meal. "Like hell it's not!" I murmur through my stitches.

I just kind of chill out for awhile, finally making the journey out of the bedroom to go crash on the couch. I make a point to turn off most of the lights because I my eyes don't adjust. Alton Brown is on the television pressing cubes of tuna against a charcoal grill. I have an ice pack in a sock pressed against my jaw. I just might submit this idea to "Hints from Heloise" if I ever get a newspaper subscription.

Erica has been busy while I've been asleep. The fridge is filled with soft foods and nutrient drinks: yogurt, pudding, cottage cheese. Things that can be consumed with little to no chewing. This is good, since every time I open my mouth to a decent diameter, I get the nagging feeling that I probably shouldn't.

There is a bottle of Amoxicillin, a bottle of Vicodin, and a bottle of Advil on the coffee table all looking up at me. I'd like to keep using the Advil, but I am told in the literature that the pain factor increases over time: you hurt more on Day 1 than you do on Day 0, and more on Day 2 than you do on Day 1, until it plateaus and the healing begins. So, probably on Saturday night, I'm going to have to escalate from the pedestrian ibuprofen to the codeine-based Mercedes Benz 380SL convertible. It's been said that Vicodin is a drug that makes you feel so good you want to call up the phone company just to tell them how good a job they're doing. Given my contempt for SBC and all it stands for, we'll see if that actually transpires.

Time for another ice pack.