Loopy

I’ve been enjoying my post-birthday week so much that even the removal of my top wisdom teeth hasn’t ruined my day or anything. This is possibly because I am still high from the combination of Valium, nitrous gas, and Vicodin I got to have yesterday, or possibly because getting my teeth out has mostly been an excuse to take multiple naps and eat lots of FAGE 0% and chocolate pudding. I saved up a bunch of books and magazines I wanted to read and I was going to use this weekend to watch the first season of Gray’s Anatomy that all the kids like, and figure out my new birthday camera and also to appreciate all the nice packages and cards that have been steadily trickling in but it turns out that all those good drugs they gave me make me so extremely stupid that about all I’ve been able to do for the past twenty-four hours has been to locate the bed in my room so I could take a more effective nap than I might just sprawled out on the floor. I’m only on extra-strength generic Tylenol at the moment and I still feel pretty stupid. I did manage to read an article about how, like, if we ever find aliens, probably they’ll be a lot like octopuses. I found this cheering because it’s not like I haven’t been doing PR for cephalopods for a while now, so maybe I won’t be immediately annihilated with all y’all squid-haters.

I was really scared to get my remaining wisdom teeth out, and in 2005 I made the same stupid, stupid mistake I did a couple of years ago and decided just…not to go to the dentist because I was sort of scared to. Even though my awesome dentist Dr. Ranta is really nice and friendly and attempts to give me gas and doesn’t yell at me and lets me listen to music while he’s drilling around in there, I was just really scared and I didn’t want to go. So when I finally did realize that I better figure out what was going on in my mouth before I leave the country for a year, I was pretty sheepish about the whole thing, and also pretty sure I was going to have to have some mildly major work done. I was not wrong about this. Dr. Ranta visibly blanched when he saw my x-rays. “When is the earliest possible time you can come in to get these out?” he asked, trying to be nice about it.

The last time I had to get wisdom teeth out was about five years ago, when I was very unemployed and so had a full week to be in excruciating post-op. I don’t think that other, inferior, non-Dr. Ranta dentist even tried to offer me gas, and that was when I discovered that I was really allergic to whatever non-Vicodin painkillers they gave me. I swallowed a lot of blood (eew) and threw up a lot (uuugggghh) and made the heinous mistake of watching Requiem For A Dream, which I’ve always said was good that I had my teeth out because it distracted me from the pain that is that movie. I was out of commission for a really long time and I didn’t have dental insurance at the time so I got to pay for the privilege on top of it all.

But back to the now! Yesterday I ran down to Market Street to pick up my Valium prescription and take it before my appointment. It made me very sleepy and I kept yawning and going “Whoof! Sorry! What was I saying?” as John and I were gossiping about various people we know on the way there. The very nice dental tech (hi Jen!) sat me down and explained exactly what they were going to do and she said she wanted to try me on nitrous again (“You had breakfast, right?”) and that I should definitely listen to music while they were working “because the noise gets up in your ears sometimes.” And I guess all the drugs they gave me worked, or something, because I wasn’t even ten songs into my playlist before they were done. I’d heard Dr. Ranta yelling “Do you want to know what we’re doing in there?” and I went “Nuuuh uuuuhhhh!” and that was that. I asked if I could have my teeth to take home with me (you never know when such things could come in handy) but they said no and gave me a bunch of gauze to clamp between my de-teethed jaws instead. John was right there to pick me up and we stopped at Trader Joe’s for five buckets of FAGE 0% and at the pharmacy again for the vicodin, which I took last night before I went to sleep and which made me feel pleasantly spinny but didn’t make me throw up, thank goodness.

In fact what I mostly feel is sort of bored. I’m still a little groggy and headachey, even without the hydrocodone, and my mouth is still sort of sore so I don’t really want to leave the house but I am having a hard time concentrating on anything else. I made it downstairs a while ago for some scrambled eggs and tomato soup, and in just a couple of hours I’ll get to have some more yogurt, but that’s about it as far as excitement goes. I did some laundry and made my bed and I’ve already taken one nap today but there’s not much else to do; my internet connection is really slow for some reason today so I’m not even messing around online as is my wont when I have a couple of slow hours to spare. I’m still scared to put my tongue back to where my teeth used to be but I’m supposed to start swishing water around back there today too so I wonder what that will be like. It’s even a kind of nice sunny day outside today but going outside would require putting on real pants and maybe a bra and I’m just too tired. This just goes to show that I would be a terrible Lady Of Leisure; I’m pretty incapable of entertaining myself for more than a day or so by myself, it seems. (It would also seem I’m incapable of entertaining anyone else with my sort of loopy dental-procedure journal entry, as well).

Still, though, if I had to have my remaining wisdom teeth out, I’m glad it’s Dr. Ranta who did it. And I am really enjoying all the nice things people have sent me for birthday week. Oh, speaking of which, you know what I learned the other night when I was out with Anne-Carolyn the other night? She told me that at my birthday party, after the stripper was done destroying my nice-girl reputation for the rest of my life and he was getting dressed unobtrusively in the hallway…he asked if he could have a doughnut on his way out. And someone gave him one! Which was very nice. I was busy having some low-key heart palpitations at the time or I would have given it to him myself.

Okay, time for some more fake Tylenol, clearly.