I Can’t Handle the Tooth!

I flew on a plane a little over a month after September 11.

I’ve ridden several roller coasters boasting themselves to be the tallest/fastest/only in the country/world/general vicinity.

I took a girl that I and many others claimed to be the hottest in the world out to dinner twice.

I’ve been two blocks from Harlem at 1:30 in the morning.

I’ve been to New Jersey.

Despite all of these things, nothing petrified me more than when the oral surgeon who hovered over my mouth for the better part of an hour said “Okay, open up.”

Back in early 2006, a toothache kept me awake all night, despite multiple doses of Tylenol taken by me in a desperate and possibly illegal attempt to remedy the discomfort. The episode prompted me to visit my dentist for the first time in nearly three years. Sure, the part-time jobs that filled my post-collegiate, post-being-kicked-off-my-dad’s-insurance-while-I-was-a-student life and their lack of a dental plan had gotten me used to a DDS-free existence, but my toothache, which is the only ailment that can hurt so much that it actually pisses you off, prompted me to take advantage of my current (full-time) job’s dental coverage and schedule an appointment.

Despite the usual poking and prodding of every sensitive area of my mouth with instruments that shouldn’t even be within a 50 mile radius of your damned HEAD, the appointment went well…until my dentist started dropping terms like “abscess” and “root canal” in regards to MY teeth. He suggested I get three of my four wisdom teeth removed. I later figured out why your four molars are dubbed “wisdom teeth”: it is wise to leave them in, no matter how severely they might decay.

He recommended me to a few oral surgeons in the area to have the procedure done. I’m sure he had the means to do this type of operation in his own office, but my guess is that, were he to do it, he knew that I would never trust him again to place anything in my mouth that wasn’t a steak.

So I ultimately visited one of the three recommended experts; I know now that my decision was the wrong one, for one of the plaques hanging in the waiting room had the typical engraved recognition of the guy’s work…and a fucking GAVEL attached alongside it. Of all the possible objects one thinks of attaching to a plaque that will hang in the waiting area of a DENTAL expert, the LAST thing should be a small HAMMER. It’d be like walking into a proctologist’s office and seeing a bronzed erect dick on the wall.

Anyway, I got X-rayed and was forced to sit in a room alone with the results:

Personally, I thought all of my teeth looked perfectly fine. Sure, I was basing this judgment on whether or not my teeth were all there, but I guess that wasn’t good enough for the dental community.

Soon, the dentist arrived: a tiny, wrinkled elder who might have performed surgery on Moses’ mouth. He looked more like the type of guy you see cruising down the Interstate in the left lane with his blinker on, going a whopping 16 MPH, his entire body frame pressed up against the steering column. And I was supposed to trust this man with sharp objects near my gums?

I had opted for the “local” anesthesia (meaning that I would be awake and Novacaine would be applied to my gums), which, in retrospect, was one of the dumbest decisions I ever made since insisting that we all eat at White Castle. This is not to say that I am an advocate for the “general” anesthesia (where you are put to sleep), either, for what you don’t know about this is the fact that you have to sign a form acknowledging that you understand that such a practice carries with it, among other things, the slight risk of CARDIAC ARREST and DEATH.

DEATH for a TOOTH? I’ll opt for Tom Hanks’ ice skate procedure that he did in “Castaway.”

A few nurses came in, bringing the grand total of people who would be extracting objects that had been in my mouth since infancy to THREE. Fucking THREE. My family’s mechanic can fix an entire damn CAR by HIMSELF. After they—why not?—took my blood pressure, it was time for the Novacaine.

Which was in a syringe.

Which had a needle attached to it.

Which was being poked into three of my GUMS.

I’ve been a fan of the MTV show “Jackass” since it premiered and loved its subsequent movies. One thing I failed to notice about the show until that day was the fact that not a single one of the “Jackass” cast members underwent oral surgery. They would ram shopping carts into each other, attach bottle rockets to their schlongs, shove toy cars up their butts, and intentionally give each other paper cuts…but they apparently (and wisely) drew the line at oral surgery.

“This might hurt a little” the doctor said as he advanced the needle towards my mouth. Several excruciatingly painful moments later, I realized he is also probably the type of person to remark that the Pacific Ocean is “just a little damp.” As we all waited for the drug to numb my face, I decided that coming here in the first place pretty much carried with it Class A Retard Status, so I decided to keep going with the stupidity. Before everyone present could start to small talk with me about sports or some such shit, I informed them all of my then-upcoming trip to Honolulu.

Dropping a bombshell like this in the middle of February in Pennsylvania is guaranteed to make just about anyone jealous. But doing so in an oral surgeon’s office probably intensified the jealousy to the point where they undoubtedly felt that the pain they would soon inflict on me would be well justified. Maybe I hoped that releasing this information would somehow cause them to say, “Oh, well, you don’t need to have these teeth removed, for the air in Hawai’i will automatically cure them.” No such luck, though.

My 3:15 appointment ended a little before 4:00, which might mean it took 45 minutes (possibly less) in actual time, but in Guy-Who’s-Stuck-in-the-Chair-Having-the-Procedure-Done Time, it felt more like several years. Before digging in my mouth for enamel treasure, the doctor put his hand on my shoulder and pressed lightly on it.

“See what I’m doing here? I’m just applying a little pressure. That’s all you’re going to feel: just a little bit of pressure.”

Yeah.

In all honesty, aside from some definite, noticeable “pressure,” the first tooth came out relatively easy. But the SECOND and THIRD teeth, who were now aware of what was going on once their upper left side neighbor was forcibly evicted, decided that there would be no better time to firmly embed themselves in my jaw as hard as they could. In other words, their removal was the largest pain I or anyone else has ever felt. I would have rather had a screwdriver stuck into my eyeball. I would have rather had a piece of the lead from mechanical pencils shoved up my penis hole. I would have rather listened to the collective works of Kenny G and Yanni SIMULTANEOUSLY.

It honestly felt like he was pushing the tooth further BACK in my mouth instead of pulling it out. I have no idea what tools he was using, for I kept my eyes closed the whole time. All I can tell you was that a fucking DRILL was started at one point to aid in the removal. I had my mouth twisted open every possible and impossible way, and the fact that the “spit sucker” had made my mouth drier than the Sahara Desert in June wasn’t exactly helping matters much. Twisting, pulling, pushing, and virtually every other action (except that “slight pressure”) that should never be undertaken in a mouth were performed on me by the three experts, which I swear had multiplied to about 50 by that point. I guarantee that, when you go to Hell, you do not eternally burn in bubbling cauldrons; you get wisdom teeth pulled. When you’re having that done to you, soaking in giant black pots over the hottest flames in creation is a much more pleasant alternative. It was somewhere in this conscious nightmare that I formed the first rational thought of the day: the lone wisdom tooth that remains in my mouth…the one whose removal the doctor said was “optional”…is staying right where it is, along with all of my other teeth. Cavemen never had to have their teeth eventually replaced with “dentures”, and they are still alive today (at least according to certain Geico commercials).

Still not entirely positive that it was still February or even the year 2006, I was eventually free to go. My molars had been officially replaced by a seemingly infinite taste of blood and two pieces of gauze on either side of my mouth. In fact, to rub it in, they gave me ADDITIONAL gauze in case I were to need it:

In fact, this was given to me before the operation commenced, but the ensuing pain caused me to twist and rip the poor innocent package to shreds. The package pictured above, which I have thankfully yet to open, was the second one bestowed upon me.

Now in possession of dry lips with no feeling to them, I also noticed that the gauze and leftover Novacaine had left me sounding like a Special Olympics athlete, which served me right, seeing as how the entire decision to get this done in the first place was retarded.

I also got a prescription for some sort of pain medication:

…which my sister, who works at a doctor’s office, later informed me was exceptionally “weak.” She suggested I take ibuprofen with each dose and, having already achieved my life’s highest stupidity levels that day, decided to listen to her, despite her being the same person who once thought that we wouldn’t be able to start our car because the power went out.

In addition to the $635 bill, I was presented with a list of rules to follow in the days after the surgery. Basically, I was not allowed to eat anything firmer than pudding and that everything that entered my mouth can be no other temperature aside from “lukewarm.” Interestingly, it tells me not to touch the affected areas with my tongue or fingers…but then states to brush my teeth no later than the next day! In other words, my tongue, which really doesn’t have an option to leave my mouth or rub up against its enamel neighbors, is not to even look at either side of my mouth, but a damn toothbrush is more than welcome. Yeah, I’m supposed to insert ANOTHER thin object into my mouth.

The rules also tell me to rinse my mouth out with SALT WATER the next day. Yeah, salt on three separate wounds. That will be fun.

Anyway, I came home, situated my ass in bed, and was generously waited on hand and foot by my family. Many cups of vanilla pudding were ingested, as were numerous pain pills and water.

And why?

Because of these culprits right here. Here are two of the three little bastards that made Presidents’ Day 2006 one of the worst days of my life thus far (the other one came out in “pieces” and thus couldn’t be salvaged):