On the Outs

Last Tuesday I went in for extremely minor oral surgery to finish work on a root canal process, and remove one of my wisdom teeth that was preventing the final cap from getting placed on said root canal. It's hard to quantify exactly how much this whole thing disturbed me, right down to my very (semi-sweet chocolatey) core, but man-oh-man I will try.

Because I don't like drills, or needles, and I really hate cutting, and then the scraping, and the numbness all day long followed by just intense pain, and the blood, and geez I'm grossing myself out and I haven't even gotten to the part where the dentist started singing along to Avril Lavigne during the procedure, ruining all Canadian singer/songwriters for me for life.

The whole thing was made infinitely worse by my necessity to be in the office all week long, including but not limited to, the three hours immediately following the procedure and the morning following. Other things that caused me issue during the adventure:

• The pain medication is, of course, awesome, but puts me in a state that isn't so much "out of it" as it is "out of it completely, with a tendency to drool onto the fancy new couch." Which, y'know, LAME.
• Not eating solid foods doesn't seem like a huge issue, until you try to find soft foods that actually have some sort of nutritional value. Campbells condensed soups provide basically nothing that you need to survive in the world, except 105% your daily recommended allowance of sodium, which I assume I was already getting from all those salt-water mouth rinses. And yogurt? I'm sorry, but Yoplait only has 100 calories per huge bucket of goop. Yes it was delicious, but damn man, my metabolism is such that I burned those 100 calories just trying to rip the little foil cover off the container. Not an exaggeration in the slightest, I dropped 4 pounds by Thursday when I got home from work.
• After my boss warned me of the horrors that were associated with the dreaded 'dry socket' I went online to read up and make sure I was doing everything right with my aftercare and not dooming myself to "intense pain and unpleasant odor of the mouth." And the Internet put me in such a right freak-out state that I'm still pretty much ruined. To express it in proper mathematical notation:
  
  Let x = the amount of time that I spend obsessively worrying about the hole in my mouth to the point of ruination of everything else in the world.
  
  Let y = the amount of time since tooth out.
  
  With p = time while at work,
  k = time spent hopped up on pain pills,
  And z = time while is asleep.
  
  Final Equation:
  x = y
  
  Because not only does it consume my every waking hour, I even compulsively dream about the hideous hole in my mouth. Unwieldy issues is what I'm getting at.

In any case, things are basically better, I get the stitches out tomorrow, and so far I'm pretty sure the whole dry socket thing has been avoided, because there is no pain associated with the hole, although the underside of my jaw still hurts like nothing else. But after tomorrow, the cap should be in place and I won't have to worry about any more dental hijinks. At least until January, when the other three wisdom teeth will be coming out.

Save me, Jebus.