My Face Hurts

My life has largely been blessed with good health and free of injuries, mainly because I did not play football (read: dripping with sarcasm). Except for a few small problems (ear aches), almost all of my medical treatment has occured in my mouth. When I was in middle school, I suffered the indignity of braces, though it was a nice period in my life when Mom treated me to many a milkshake. I distinctly remember being told by my orthodontist and dentist that I needed to have my wisdom teeth taken out. Now I am not sure if the rest of the family know this, but Dad has a theory about the dental industry. He believes it is all set up as a system of kickbacks and mutually beneficial, but unnecessary, procedures among dentists, oral surgeons, and orthodontists. He also believes that nature did not intend for us to run a piece of string between our teeth. Anyway, I guess because of the level of water that I drink, I get so much flouride that my teeth are solid as rocks, because they did not move when my wisdom teeth came in, so they were left there. I now post some interesting info from the always reliable wikipedia (Dad, as an academic, do you allow the citation of Wikipedia in your students' papers? Do they try?).

"Potential problems caused by the presence of properly grown-in wisdom teeth include infections caused by food particles easily trapped in the jaw area behind the wisdom teeth where regular brushing and flossing is difficult and not effective. Such infections may be frequent, and cause considerable pain and medical danger."

This is apparently what happened to me. For the last few weeks my teeth have been extremely sensitive to cold temps. I hoped to wait it out till my insurance at the new job kicked in (in a week or two), but could not. On closer inspection, my back right wisdom tooth had turned black and my brother and fiancee decided that I should go to the dentist. He (the dentist, not Chris) sent me to an oral surgeon and they pulled the bad boy out. This is the worst procedure (luckily) I have had to go through. Oddly, the part that hurts the worst is when they put on the local anisthetic. Afterwards, you get to have the odd experiece of first seeing the wicked looking extraction saw. Then, equally odd, you feel the preasure and hear the sound of him taking it out. The assistant had one hand bracing the bottom of my jaw and the other holding open the top of my mouth. That makes four hands in my mouth at once while I am hanging on for dear life.

All in all the process only took a few minutes and the after effects have been minimal. It has only provided me with a reason to eat pasta three meals a day. The other bottom wisdom tooth will have to come out later, so I am not really looking forward to that. Again let me heap blessings upon my new job, which back dates my insurance so I will be refunded and the next one will be much more administratively easy.

Oh, by the way, I tried to post some picutres of the tools he used, but again cannot figure out how to get a picture up here. That is okay, though, I am a descriptive writer.