Alright, so besides having to get up at the asscrack of dawn to go to the dentist ((where I go, the surgeon is only there for three hours and they try to cram ten million people in from 7:30am - 10:30am)), it's not too bad, yet. I couldn't sleep the night before because I was so nervous, so I stayed up late watching infomercials. Not much to the story until I get into the actual dentist chair. I'm pretty nervous, so my hands are a bit shaky as I sign the consent form to having a student watch the surgeon perform. That's not a big deal. My normal dentist gives me novacaine to start the process and lets me alone for about 15 minutes to let it sink in. She comes back and gives me a bit more, then leaves again... I hear a lot of drilling and sawing noises coming from the other rooms, and what I think is a grown man crying ((and he was, I later figured out)).
And now it's my turn. I have novacaine. That's it. I'm not put under, I don't have laughing gas or whatever. And the surgeon comes in, wedges a black thing on the opposite side of my mouth to keep it open for him, and he immediately goes to work. I hear "Make a 45 degree cut here and here" and suddenly my mouth is full of blood. They had to put a smaller nozzle on the spit sucker to fit it in my mouth... I have an extremely small mouth. I had originally thought I could keep my eyes open for this, but I learned very quickly that watching the surgeon was not a smart idea, especially since in Bioshock, one of my favorite video games, there is a doctor that looked exactly like him and he turned out to be very evil. I closed my eyes and just laid there. I felt something splatter on my face, heard and "oops" and a slight laugh, and I opened my eyes for a second to see that, somehow, blood had smattered my glasses. Just lovely. Eyes closed again. And suddenly, I feel like the surgeon has a crow bar in my mouth.... a small one, but he's jerking it just like you would a crowbar. And I'm TERRIFIED. You know, I've never had anything this big done to me before. So my legs start shaking really, really badly and I'm trying as hard as I can not to actually have a panic attack. My normal dentist actually sits down next to me and begins to pat my leg to try to help me calm down.
This was about 15 minutes in, mind you. Now, pretend that I've described the crowbar part to you for a good 45 minutes... because that's how long it took him to get it out. The root *is that what it's called?* was curved so drastically he had to seriously work to get it loose enough to pull out. I was scheduled to have both teeth on the top and bottom of my left side to be removed, but the surgeon refused to do the bottom one, using the excuse that "he didn't think I needed to be in more pain than I already was." So great, I get to go through this 3 more times.
I had to go back for a checkup a week after the extraction, and they told me that in the 40 years that the surgeon had been doing extractions, that mine was in the top 3 as the worst he had to do. I felt like a celebrity because everyone was like "is that the girl that took so long?" while I was there... it was crazy.
I spit out my stitches on Sweetest Day... and at the moment, I still can't open my jaw wider than about 1/2 an inch. I have to do "mouth exercises" to gain back mobility... eating is a challenge. I can't eat anything big still, and I have to cut everything up into little tiny pieces. Brat Girlfriend laughs at me a lot, but it's cute; she calls me her "tiny mouth girlfriend" and always offers to smash my food for me. She makes fun of me when we go out to eat; I can't eat my favorite soup at Olive Garden (chicken and gnocci) without having to cut up the gnocci... she says "Who has to cut up soup to eat it?!"
That's basically all I have to say on the matter...
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