I do not know what has happened to my attention span lately. Maybe someone threw it out with the good weather. Maybe it’ll come back in a couple days? I was just in the middle of some social media work when there was this lady with a picture of brilliant white teeth and an article about dental hygiene and whole-body health. That made me think of two things: 1) Man my teeth are yellow, but geez it’s the last thing on my mind (generally) and 2) Oh yeah. Wisdom tooth!

I am grateful for everyone who wrote to tell me getting a wisdom tooth is no big deal. Now, the majority of folks who told me that had their tooth removed while asleep or on happy drugs – but I think they were essentially right. Getting the tooth removed is no big deal. It’s just damn uncomfortable.

So, following a networking breakfast, I walked my butt over to the dentist and met Zsolt. Big Z’s job was to keep my older brother notified so he could come by and pick me up. It’s was quite kind of JP to do that in the middle of his day. So kind, that I’m going to link you to his website right now and say he’s a really great acupuncturist in Ottawa, if you happen to be looking 🙂

Anyhow, Zsolt stayed in the lobby and I went into the dentist procedure room place. Here’s what I recall quite clearly.

Freezing. First she applied a gel to freeze my cheek. Then, injection by injection, she froze the whole thing up. I lay there looking at the ceiling for about five minutes have a flash back to the only time the dentist filled a cavity in my mouth. It was a baby tooth, and I cried like crazy when the freezing set it. There’s something so wholly uncomfortable about the freezing . . . at least until it settles down.

So, the dentist & her assistant come back in, they give me one more freezing shot, wait, and then away we go!

Holy crap. Everything was numb. No pain. But a lot of psychological WTF was going on nevertheless. For some reason, as she began to scrape away the gum, I started singing the ABCs in my head over and over. That worked quite well – that and gripping the arm rests for dear life.

Then a discovery was made. I had a MASSIVE wisdom tooth. It was all they could talk about! “Oh that tooth is so big. I hadn’t expected such a big tooth. For such a small woman that is a huge tooth.” They needed to drill it. And drill it. And drill it. And drill it.

Again, no pain. Just some messed up visuals. Basically there was tooth and jaw dust flying into the air. Every time they brought down that little circular drill I moved my tongue away for deal life. Surely they must have safe guards on those things, right? So – high-pitched drilling noises, no pain, dust, and time.

Oh, and I was actually mentally filming this in my head. I was literally thinking it was a shame my eyes weren’t also a camera, but it was a really incredible shot.

Eventually the tooth was removed and I was stitched up. The remainder of the day was spent with Netflix acting as a mental dampener to the discomfort – the unfreezing was really crap, but after about 7 hours it was mostly okay. So overall I’d say it sucks to get an impacted, deeply buried and massive wisdom tooth removed. Sucks but is doable. Hey yes it’s doable. It’s just not what I’d choose to be doing with my time, generally. The bit that hurt the most was the bill. But as my friend Kevin says, it’s not exactly an area where you look to go cheap.

But as that article reminded me – it’s better to take care of your mouth, since you are therefore taking care of your whole body.

One tooth down, one more to go. I think the next one will involve far less drilling.

Weird Stuff!