Friday July 29th was the beginning of my fourth year of keeping this daily journal.
Friday was
also the day that I had to go to Smile City for oral surgery. My appointment
was for 14:00 and I think the dentist saw me pretty much on time.
Dr He started
with the cleaning. First there was a lot of grinding away of the year’s
accumulations.
Bogdan, the assistant, appears to be
in training, The dentists at Smile City are all professionals but so far I’ve
only experienced one assistant that seemed fully competent. Dr He had to remind
Bogdan on at least two occasions that he has to be able to see the tooth that’s
being worked on or the suction is useless.
After the grinding came the
picking, which felt more like either prospecting or excavating. This led to the
dentist asking me how often I brush my teeth. I told him twice a day. He asked
if the toothbrush is hard or soft and I said that it felt pretty soft to me. He
told me that I am either brushing too much or with too hard a brush because
I’ve been damaging my teeth. He pointed out that there are abrasions,
attritions and something else that sounded like “illusions”. He stressed to
Bogdon that he will have to learn the terminology. He informed me that I need a
softer toothbrush and told me that personally he uses a kid’s toothbrush
because they are very soft. He said that when he was in Japan he found
toothbrushes for adults that were as soft as those for children and he bought a
hundred of them. He told me that they can’t be found in Canada. At the end, Dr
He left the room and let Bogdon do the polishing. It felt like a sloppy job and
on top of that there is no sink in that room for rinsing.
When
the cleaning was done, Dr He was about to say goodbye when I reminded him that
he was going to do an extraction. I’d thought we’d decided it last time but I
guess he hadn’t been sure that I’d made the decision to go along with it. He
assured me that the procedure was necessary and that the tooth couldn’t be
saved.
After the first needle, Dr He
waited a minute or so, then poked certain places to see if I felt pain. In some
places, to his surprise it seemed to me, I still did, so he gave me another
needle. The numbness began to spread to the right edge of my tongue and the
corner of my lip. I could even feel a little dull around my throat, but some
places where he poked still caused some degree of pain. He applied some local
anesthetic a couple of times and that did the trick. He told me that I’d only
had two needles and that’s the average, but that some people require eleven
needles before they stop feeling pain. I can’t imagine how intense the
non-feeling would feel if I had been given eleven needles.
Dr He not only had to remove the
last tooth in the lower right back of my mouth, but also needed to dig out all
traces of the periodontal cyst that had been surrounding the tooth. There was a
lot of blood in the end and so I had to bite hard on a balled up piece of gauze
for a 40-minute period, twenty minutes of which continued after I got home.
Before I left, Dr He gave me a list
of detailed typed instructions, but added some of his own by hand. I was very
surprised by the main one, which said that I was not to brush, floss or rinse
for 24 hours. It seemed to me that it should be alright to brush in the area
where I hadn’t had the surgery, but he insisted that I not brush at all. He
also said that I should not eat hot food or drink hot beverages for 24 hours,
but suggested that it would be better if I extended those limitations to 48
hours. He added that I should never EVER use the Waterpik on the area where I’d
had the surgery.
Twenty minutes after I got home I
removed the ball of gauze. It was well stained with two shades of dark red. Dr
He had given me another piece of gauze to ball up and shove into the same place
if it was still bleeding there, but I didn’t need to.
The right side of my mouth was
still frozen, and even my right eye felt a little bit numb. My right cheek
looked like I was storing nuts inside of it.
At 17:00 I thought about taking a
long bike ride and I felt strong enough to do it but the right side of my face
was very uncomfortable and it would not have been an enjoyable ride. On the
other hand, the ride might have taken my mind off of the discomfort. I also
felt a little tired though so I thought that a siesta would be the more
desirable option.
When I woke up an hour or so later
the freezing was gone.
I watched an episode of I Love Lucy
in which Ethel Mertz (Vivian Vance) sang. That woman could sing!
It felt grimy and decadent to deliberately go to bed
without brushing my teeth.
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