One of my 2012 New Year’s resolutions was to get my teeth fixed. The slight challenge to making progress on this was the fact that I have no intention whatsoever of letting a Chinese dentist do anything at all. I am sure that China has most excellent dentists but when we are talking about major (my definition) dental work, then I want to be able to understand what is going on.
Well that’s not quite true. I had arranged to have my badly behaved and directionally challenged wisdom teeth extracted at a surgery near the house in Pennsylvania. The denstist came with many recommendations and seem to know what he was doing. And I liked him. Finally they had actual rooms in his surgery – the last place I went to in the US lined everyone up in a big rooms with office dividers – so it felt more like somewhere you’d get a pedicure. NOT somewhere I was going to have teeth out.
So last Monday was T-Day. I’ve been nervous about this day since the day I found my pesky wisdom teeth growing (very late – only a few years ago. I’m still waiting for the wisdom too). I showed up shaky with adrenaline but just about holding it together. I was arranged on the seat by a nurse/ assistant who gave me a really attractive bib to catch the inevitable drool. She also decided to take it upon herself to talk me through the procedure. She started with “…he’ll give you injections so you won’t feel anything, you’ll just feel a slight pulling. And then you will hear a pop when he cuts the ligaments…” “Can I stop you right there…” I interrupted. “ I don’t want to know about that.” Undaunted she carried on “the ligaments are tough so when he cuts them…”. At this point I really wished she was speaking Mandarin.
I tried twice more to interrupt then just asked her to stop talking. I think she was mildly offended and left. My previously tenuous grasp on normal behaviour was gone though, so when the other, actually nicer nurse/ assistant came and asked me a simple question (“hello, how are you?” probably) I just burst into rather undignified tears (also due to lack of waterproof mascara I suspect I rapidly resembled a refugee from Kiss). She took pity on me and just said “I think we’ll use the nitrous rig”. When the dentist came and I tried to apologise for overreacting and attempted to explain that my rational side knew that it was an easy routine job, but the less rational, terrified-of-medical-things side was currently beating the crap out of my rational side. He was very kind. He said that actually it wasn’t a particularly irrational reaction…he was about to pull things out of my head after all…
Strangely that did calm me down. The nitrous oxide helped a treat too, so while certainly not anything I want to repeat in a hurry the whole extraction thing was OK. He offered just to do one but I refused point blank – they had to both go NOW. He did a great job actually and had given me so much anaesthetic I couldn’t feel most of my face for hours, let alone the teeth. He didn’t even have to put his knee on my chest for leverage, which was one of my memories from a previous extraction. The other memory was enormous pliers. I have no idea if that’s what this chap used because I kept my (rather smudged) eyes firmly shut for the duration.
Recovery has so far been OK too. A soft diet was recommended so I lived on smoothies and red wine for several days. I’ve been taking plenty of arnica too so that may have contributed to the fact there was very little swelling – actually just enough to look like I’ve had some cheek filler and actually quite fetching.
Things could definitely be worse. I could have grown four wisdom teeth not two for a start…