So, I had my surgery, and after it all, after the oxygen and the laughing gas and the track marks in my arm and the back of my hand, after it all, I told one of the nice attending nurses not to hit me.
Oh, I was just stupid with sedation, and I got it into my head that she was going to jostle my head. I was afraid, you see, that in my delicate state, the lovely trained professional, in all of her moving around, would somehow jut an elbow out or something, and hit my newly sensitive face. And so, I mumbled, "Don't hit me" and she said, "Pardon?" And so I mumbled through the gauze and the brain-clouds again, "Don't hit me," all the while thinking that I was being very eloquent for someone who'd just been put out. And she said, "Oh, don't be silly."
And later that night, when I finally woke up, I remembered it all, and blushed with shame, because I realized I'd accidentally accused this lovely woman of assaulting me.
I've had the chance to apologize though, because I had to pay an emergency visit to the oral surgeon yesterday morning. The pain, you see, did not subside in the appropriate amount of time, and in fact had gotten worse, with the throbbing and the aching and the not letting me sleep-ing. All this, of course, was on top of the rotgut stomach that was being produced because of a week of anti-inflammatory medication. Except, they weren't really doing their thing, see? I mean, they were making me stupid and unable to function properly, and they were ripping up my mostly-empty-due-to-not-eating-because-of-tooth-pain-etcetera stomach, but they weren't dealing with the pain. So, I'm not eating, and I'm still hurting, and I'm kind of walking around all dazed and stupid all week, because you know, when the anti-inflams aren't enough, you gotta go with the Tylenol 3s, right? Oh, it was a lovely week, treacle�s. Also? The dissolvable stitches? Yeah, not so dissolvable! Cut-into-gums-until they bleed-able, but not dissolvable!
In the end, the emergency visit yielded what I had suspected: dry socket. Somewhere along the line, the healing blood clot didn't form, and so the healing didn't happen. Instead, a vicious pocket of air was breezing up and down the newly exposed nerve. Dry socket.
I'm now referring to it as dry rot.
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