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the electric man looks good today
Thursday, July 6th, 2006 12:10 pmd., the oral surgeon, has his practice just off exit 267B (the exit before 575 north), so i took a.'s car and got in some fun mid-day highway driving on the way up. he's a super-nice guy, very friendly, who asked good questions and explained what he was doing every step of the way. the first thing he did was take an x-ray, which very clearly showed an abscess beneath the lower front right tooth that started the whole thing. the abcess was there because the tooth had DIED. o.O
how had the tooth died? the good news: it does not seem to be my fault! he was honestly baffled about how it happened, not being due to 1) tooth decay or 2) trauma (i would remember getting punched in the mouth in the not-too-distant past, right? i mean, right?), the two usual causes. i did chip the tooth in question, but that was THREE YEARS AGO and i was eating a salad at the time. so the bad news is that i don't know what i did wrong, and therefore cannot refrain from doing it in the future. the jury's still out on whether this is better or worse than not knowing what i did right, a much more frequent motif in the story of my life. d. joked about it, "you know, maybe it was depressed," but frankly, i'm not sure how i feel about random body parts just giving up the ghost. i mean, what kind of message does that send? what's next, my left big toe? my frontal lobe? so—
WHO HERE HAS HAD EMERGENCY ROOT CANAL?
because i have not! what i did have yesterday was a pulpotomy, the preliminary procedure for a root canal when your abscess is INFECTED. it's even more awesome than it sounds! he shot me up with novocaine, then made a hole in the back of the tooth and went into the nerve canal with metal spikes to scrape out all the pus and infected bits he could. then he put me on a six-day course of antibiotics, and i made an appointment to come back in two weeks, when the infection will hopefully be cleared up. and THEN i can have a root canal. i can't wait!
d. kept trying to familiarize the process for me ("have you ever had a root canal before?" "okay, you know when you get your teeth drilled—no?") and failing, so even though he briefed me on what he was going to do, i wasn't quite prepared for it, and it all happened very quickly. because of the novocaine (and i was instructed to raise my hand if i felt pain at any time, so he could shoot me up some more), it's not a painful experience, but it's a very, very tense one. it involves holding your mouth wide open the whole time, and two people leaning over you with various tools, and by their actions and the NOISE—these horrible scraping noises—and the pressure, you know intellectually that it should hurt; the fact that it doesn't is nice, but in the meantime you're flinching in anticipation of pain through the whole thing. i started shaking halfway through, even though i knew it was all okay.
in addition to the antibiotic, he gave me ten vicodin, making him officially my favorite person on the planet. he cautioned me to only use them if and when i needed to:
d.: if tylenol and advil are working, keep using those.
me: well, i was up to three advil every three hours.
d.: yeah, that's too much.
also: novocaine is AWESOME. *pokes at lip forever* novocaine for the soul sounds so much more jolly now!
i called c. on the way back down after d. sent me on my merry way to let her know what the diagnosis had been, and that i'd be stopping at publix to fill my prescriptions on the way in. i felt pretty good when i got back to the office, but that night i developed this horrible headache from 1) the earlier TRAUMA1, 2) hunger2, and 3) dehydration from the antibiotic. plus my mouth, which had felt better after the novocaine and the procedure that had relieved a lot of the pressure, started throbbing again. so i skipped right over the rescheduled fireworks i'd been invited to watch, caught up with the flist, took a vicodin, and went to bed early, looking forward to sleeping through the night for the first time in a week! aaaand then i woke up four hours later and had to take another one. I FEEL LIKE AN INFANT.
i feel much better this morning; i have survived on two advil and a lot of water, and i'm HUNGRY. on the plus side: i don't seem to be experiencing any side effects from the antibiotic (possible side effects including diarrhea, skin eruptions, respiratory distress), i am just INCREDIBLY THIRSTY ASLDFKJASF. the swelling has gone down already; i'd been bearing a closer and closer resemblance to the habsburgs with my lantern jaw. if this whole "file-clerk" thing hadn't worked out, i was going to try my luck as pretender to the throne of the holy roman empire.
oh-h, ye-es, i'm the great preeetender. oooh, oooh . . .
1. i am, in general, accustomed to being hale and hearty, and i think i've been handling this whole experience VERY BADLY, but there you go. hopefully it'll be over soon.
2. back when this whole mess started a week ago, the applied pressure from eating or brushing my teeth felt good, like rubbing a sore muscle; that time is long gone!
how had the tooth died? the good news: it does not seem to be my fault! he was honestly baffled about how it happened, not being due to 1) tooth decay or 2) trauma (i would remember getting punched in the mouth in the not-too-distant past, right? i mean, right?), the two usual causes. i did chip the tooth in question, but that was THREE YEARS AGO and i was eating a salad at the time. so the bad news is that i don't know what i did wrong, and therefore cannot refrain from doing it in the future. the jury's still out on whether this is better or worse than not knowing what i did right, a much more frequent motif in the story of my life. d. joked about it, "you know, maybe it was depressed," but frankly, i'm not sure how i feel about random body parts just giving up the ghost. i mean, what kind of message does that send? what's next, my left big toe? my frontal lobe? so—
WHO HERE HAS HAD EMERGENCY ROOT CANAL?
because i have not! what i did have yesterday was a pulpotomy, the preliminary procedure for a root canal when your abscess is INFECTED. it's even more awesome than it sounds! he shot me up with novocaine, then made a hole in the back of the tooth and went into the nerve canal with metal spikes to scrape out all the pus and infected bits he could. then he put me on a six-day course of antibiotics, and i made an appointment to come back in two weeks, when the infection will hopefully be cleared up. and THEN i can have a root canal. i can't wait!
d. kept trying to familiarize the process for me ("have you ever had a root canal before?" "okay, you know when you get your teeth drilled—no?") and failing, so even though he briefed me on what he was going to do, i wasn't quite prepared for it, and it all happened very quickly. because of the novocaine (and i was instructed to raise my hand if i felt pain at any time, so he could shoot me up some more), it's not a painful experience, but it's a very, very tense one. it involves holding your mouth wide open the whole time, and two people leaning over you with various tools, and by their actions and the NOISE—these horrible scraping noises—and the pressure, you know intellectually that it should hurt; the fact that it doesn't is nice, but in the meantime you're flinching in anticipation of pain through the whole thing. i started shaking halfway through, even though i knew it was all okay.
in addition to the antibiotic, he gave me ten vicodin, making him officially my favorite person on the planet. he cautioned me to only use them if and when i needed to:
d.: if tylenol and advil are working, keep using those.
me: well, i was up to three advil every three hours.
d.: yeah, that's too much.
also: novocaine is AWESOME. *pokes at lip forever* novocaine for the soul sounds so much more jolly now!
i called c. on the way back down after d. sent me on my merry way to let her know what the diagnosis had been, and that i'd be stopping at publix to fill my prescriptions on the way in. i felt pretty good when i got back to the office, but that night i developed this horrible headache from 1) the earlier TRAUMA1, 2) hunger2, and 3) dehydration from the antibiotic. plus my mouth, which had felt better after the novocaine and the procedure that had relieved a lot of the pressure, started throbbing again. so i skipped right over the rescheduled fireworks i'd been invited to watch, caught up with the flist, took a vicodin, and went to bed early, looking forward to sleeping through the night for the first time in a week! aaaand then i woke up four hours later and had to take another one. I FEEL LIKE AN INFANT.
i feel much better this morning; i have survived on two advil and a lot of water, and i'm HUNGRY. on the plus side: i don't seem to be experiencing any side effects from the antibiotic (possible side effects including diarrhea, skin eruptions, respiratory distress), i am just INCREDIBLY THIRSTY ASLDFKJASF. the swelling has gone down already; i'd been bearing a closer and closer resemblance to the habsburgs with my lantern jaw. if this whole "file-clerk" thing hadn't worked out, i was going to try my luck as pretender to the throne of the holy roman empire.
oh-h, ye-es, i'm the great preeetender. oooh, oooh . . .
1. i am, in general, accustomed to being hale and hearty, and i think i've been handling this whole experience VERY BADLY, but there you go. hopefully it'll be over soon.
2. back when this whole mess started a week ago, the applied pressure from eating or brushing my teeth felt good, like rubbing a sore muscle; that time is long gone!