Recently as I edge closer and closer to thirty, I decided to take a better look at my over all health. Truthfully I spend so much time taking my children to the doctor's office that I have spent more time in waiting rooms than I care to. I even have my own personally embossed chair. There is a whole list of things that need to get done, and that I would rather get done, such as alphabetizing my food storage, than sit in a waiting room when it was not made mandatory by such fun things as strep throat, ear infections, and what one child still claims was a vagrant strand of a the mathallergonic plague.
But if you use the analogy that the human body is like a car - mine was long overdue for a routine oil change and tune up. It took me years to figure out regular vehicle maintenance schedules for my actual vehicle, so it makes sense that it took even longer for me to figure out such things for myself.
Just like I would like my van to last at least another 100,000 or so more miles, I would like my body to last another 60 years. So I begrudgingly went in to both the doctor's office and the dentist - I am smart enough to know that good oral health helps maintain good overall health. Plus I still had that lingering wisdom tooth issue.
End result? The removal of two suspicious looking moles from my shoulder. They turned out to be nothing of concern, though it would have been nice to have been told that green is normal in the healing process when they use silver nitrate. My cholesterol is a little high, so I have a prescription for that - but other than that things are looking swell.
The dentist office on the other hand was not as cheerful. I had the top two wisdom teeth removed at the end of July. Not the most comfortable procedure, but necessary in that it helped reaffirm my loathing of jello and inconvenient inability to tolerate pain killers stronger than infant tylenol. Determined to get in touch with my inner masochist, two weeks later I went in for a cleaning and exam. I dragged not only myself through this, but all four of my children in back to back bright and early appointments.
My children had beautiful teeth, but I failed miserably with five cavities of my own. Whether sticking in the Shepard's hook repeatedly causing me to have cartoon like spasms and my eyeballs to pop out and stick to the ceiling was required to determine this in under debate. As that the dentist I saw for cleaning was a different partner in the practice than the one who had originally removed my upper wisdom teeth, he claimed he was up to the rather cumbersome challenge of removing my bottom wisdom teeth - a simple procedure of shaving off a chunk of the jawbone and surrounding teeth and completely avoiding the entwined nerves.
I was privileged enough to participate in this joyful experience yesterday. Sparing too many details of the event, other than it took an hour and a half to remove one of the two teeth, and I was not numbed again for the second one, I now have two more expensive holes in my mouth for my greater good.
Okay I can't resist sharing a few more details, and later I can just claim I was under the influence of some very strong Tylenol 3's. The only medication of the various options that dentist presented that I was willing to take.
It hurt. A lot. At one point my tooth shattered, sending shards impaling the interior of my mouth and also clogging their vacuum suction thingie.
The tools they use look archaic and vaguely representative of those I saw in my western civilization class when we studied medieval torture methods. I resent having a tool referred to as a cow-horn - think small shoehorn - used to remove my teeth.
I don't like nitrous being used - the mask on my face makes me claustrophobic, and I am such a control freak that I would rather endure the pain than feel the slightly fuzzy feeling - which I managed to relay to the dentist while he was using a bite block and had four fingers in my mouth.
I spent much of the time mentally trying to invent new tools and techniques that would make the whole thing more humane, especially since I know for certain there is no way that Sophie would be able to tolerate it. Doing so allowed me to remain distracted from the reflective image in the dentist's safety glasses, or that my blood was spattered on his forehead, and glasses, and face mask and and and. It was harder to ignore when he got up mid procedure to cleanse and change.
I choked at least four separate times on my own saliva and blood. This experience reminded me that it is actually possible to drown from two tablespoons of water. I was determined to survive however, as that dying by choking on your own blood without a good drug addiction seems wrong somehow.
It is never comforting to hear your dentist say "I met my match with this one."
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