The Tooth, The Whole Tooth And Nothing But The Wisdom Teeth

I’ve faced a lot of major difficulties in my short life and this Saturday morning will be no different, as I will yet again be facing another difficulty, namely surgery, though this time it’s oral.

I’ve begun to prepare for the post-operative recovery, meaning taking stock of everything up in the cupboards and in the frig and I realize that I have enough soup to fill the toilet, enough pasta to layer the bathtub four times over and enough Jell-O, pudding, oatmeal & mashed potatoes combined to cover the entire length of my body, so that even the spirits of my late and dearly departed winter mice could easily lick it off me 10 times over.

This began nearly two months ago during my routine Friday night session, when I was working out at my local YMCA on the treadmill, when all of the sudden I felt a sharp stinging pain in my mouth!

From there, I just got off the treadmill, ran downstairs to the community lounge, lay down on a couch and softly bit into a white towel for nearly an hour. Thankfully, there was no sign of blood.

The pain actually began a few nights previously while out on a date with The Detroit Mama, but it wasn’t as bad as it became on this night. All I knew on that night was that my gums hurt immensely and I needed pain relief immediately.

It was late on a Friday evening, well past the time of when dentist offices usually close. Through the good graces of my best pal The Arizona Babe, she provided me with a local dentist’s phone number who in turn prescribed a few weeks worth of penicillin to treat the infection that already had set in inside my mouth.

Up until these events occurred, I never realized that someone else could detect a disease so well like my close companion The Detroit Mama could, just by smelling my breath. That woman should have been a cop, but I digress.

As I previously stated, my gums hurt and I just didn’t know what was wrong. After enough time had passed, I found myself a decent dentist and finally made a visit to him to see what the trouble was. Between the time I went to see this dentist, I was nursing myself on liquid cocaine, generic Tylenol and Ibuprofen. Turns out it was a broken tooth, but that still didn’t tell me much and off I was referred to see an oral surgeon.

Once I got to the oral surgeon, the details forthcoming were much straighter, upfront and honest. When I got there, the hygienist did a panoramic X-ray of my mouth. All I had to do was to bite down on a thin white plastic stick and wear a heavy radiation vest on my back, as the machine did its work.

What the surgeon told me however really surprised me! He showed me within the X-ray that two of my wisdom teeth had been broken, luckily, as odd as that sounds, both are on the left side of my mouth, both directly above and below each other. He advised me that he could either pull both or take out one and do root canal on the other and just opted to have them both pulled out at the same time. He even said that there was a bit of a third wisdom tooth there, but I told him to let it be and hopefully it would fall out on its own over time.

Two of the biggest problems I’ve had of course, is chewing and kissing, as a matter of fact, because I have to be gentle on both sides of the mouth, but I’ve ended up reverting to eating on the right side of my mouth, without touching the infected & painful parts. The Detroit Mama has a genuine gentleness to her, so the kissing is quite nice.

As an avid tea drinker, I’ve even switched to drinking chamomile, as I have found that most other teas I either have or was drinking are a bit abrasive with their various flowers extractions, mysterious herbal parts and spices. Chamomile is perhaps the most gentlest of teas around, a cliché perhaps, but the truth!

The best part about this operation is, I haven’t been as nervous about this one as I have been with two nerve-wracking surgeries involving my right shoulder and my appendix in years past.

I look forward to this weekend’s surgery, because afterwards, I will soon be able to go back to a semi-normal state, in which I can chew with both sides of my mouth and kiss The Detroit Mama without grimacing ever so slightly in pain.

And that’s all any guy like me could ever ask for.