Wising Up

After prolonging the inevitable, I finally got my wisdom teeth removed yesterday. Thanks to my stubbornness and a false hope that I’d fine with them left alone, I was able to hold off for about 2 years. To be frank, I’m shamefully skilled in the art of procrastination. It was easy to make excuses like, “Oh, I’ll get them out when they start to really hurt…” Assuredly, extracting wisdom teeth at the earliest convenience is the wisest approach (bad pun, whatever).

My wisdom teeth weren’t really painful for me (yet anyway), the intervals of discomfort were spread apart and brief. I knew they had to come out regardless, however, since my lower 2 teeth were impacted, and were also crowding my front teeth. With about 2 more weeks of break before school starts for me, I finally took the much delayed initiative and hit the fast forward button.

I went to my routine Dentist earlier this month for a bi-annual cleaning, and had her refer me to the Maxilliofacial Surgery Center in San Jose. I then went there on Wednesday for consulting, and promptly scheduled the operation for the next morning.The experience was a bit scary because of how impacted my lower ones were, and they were fairly close to the mandibular nerve. Suffering permanent post-paresthesia from damaging the nerve is a small possibility, but still a possibility…

Luckily my Doctor was a Boss and I didn’t have any lingering numbness afterwards. I must say, General Anesthesia works really well. Due to its amnesic effects, all I can remember from the operation was the preparation stuff. Once that IV was in my arm, I was gone within a minute. I was told the actual removal of my three wisdom teeth (I also had one on top that grew out normal, never had a fourth) took only about 15 minutes. I have very fleeting recollections of sitting in a wheelchair, asking my Dad questions in the car, and then lying down on a recliner at home.

Eventually the local anesthesia wore off in my mouth, and I woke up from that recliner in a lot of pain. My whole mouth was really sore, and I was drooling out blood for a while. I popped a few pills, including a Vicodin, but the pain wasn’t subsiding much. I later decided to remove the blood stained gauzes in my mouth, eat one more Vicodin, and go back to bed. I’m glad the bleeding was controlled, because I wasn’t looking forward to shoving in fresh gauzes and biting down on them. Through the pain, I was still able to fall asleep.

I think plenty of rest offered a lot of relief, because the first day’s pain disappeared almost entirely today. I’m currently restricting my diet to tea, water, and apple sauce (doing my best to avoid disturbing the blood clots because I DON’T want a dry socket). The last time I ate anything substantial was a burrito on Wednesday afternoon. I’ve lost close to 4 pounds already, pretty amazing.

Overall this whole ordeal wasn’t bad at all. I’m extremely relieved I got them out, it was like having a lingering rain cloud over my head for the past couple of years.