Thursday, January 12, 2006
Fu-uck. My mouth hurts. My four wisdom teeth were extracted at about 10:15 this morning. I’m supposed to stick to cold, liquidy foods for the next couple of days. And no straws.
The satisfyingly rich, meaty taste of the blood draining out of my tooth-holes (of which only one was stitched closed) and back down my throat offsets this a bit.
My mom’s been treating me as if I had my legs amputated and has converted the den into a medical station. She’s also stocked the fridge with Odwalla juice drinks and those Starbucks® Frapuccino™ drinks that I asked for (I need non-hot caffeine). Dinner tonight will be a combination of those, I imagine. I haven’t had one of those Odwallas in a while — they cost, like, $18 in Manhattan — so that’s not so bad, I guess.
But right now I really feel like I’ve been kicked in the face. I don’t like painkillers because they make me too foggy-headed to do much more than watch television, so I took my amoxicillin tablet around noon but forwent the Vicodin. And so, the pain has not been killed. And with my unshaven face and swollen jaw, I look much more like an auto mechanic than usual.
I’m at Austin Java Company, now, sipping a Dr. Pepper (no straws!)… Once I relearned how to drink without dribbling liquid all over myself (yay, numb mouth) I decided I had to get out of the house. I’m not doing terribly much here, but it’s good to be off the sofa, away from the small-claims court shows and terrible mid-day crapumetaries on the Discovery and History Channels. I did get to watch a few minutes of Son of the Mask, though. What a piece of crap… I can understand that people have to earn a living, but why put your name on such a thing? Just pick up your check and “Directed by Anonymous.” Jesus.
But this is the first time that I can recall ever having the full dental-surgery treatment, including the nitrous oxide mask over my nose, about a dozen anesthetic shots, and a couple instances of the dentist just grinding into my fucking head with some medieval metal device as if he needed to punch a hole straight down through my jaw. “How you doing?” “Mmmffgh.” “Great. You’re going to feel some pressure…”
The combination of painkilling shots and N2O turned the whole quick event (15 minutes or so) into a kind of hazy scene out of a movie: two men hovering over me with sharp steel and buzzing instruments in front of a medical spotlight aimed right at me, mottling my vision with sharps of color and lighting flares and reflections when I would open my eyes to see what was pulling and tugging on my maxilla and mandible so hard. Cinematic. Would’ve made for some great photos if I could’ve shot through my own eyeballs.
Anyway, I’m tired of writing about this. And my mouth still hurts.
Yesterday, nothing hurt. Except the usual crushing weight of mere existence.
