How it happened: On the day I was having my wisdom teeth out, Patrick came early to pick me up. He accidentally walked through the wrong door and wound up in the operatory room while they were still working on me. I think that was during the "Adagio for Bone Saw" portion of the program.

It's not a good picture for him to have in his head. Dentists don't even want patients to see the implements they use for wisdom tooth extractions, much less procedure itself in all its gruesome glory.

No wonder, then. I wouldn't have wanted to see my wisdom tooth extraction-- it involved eight wisdom teeth, two complete sets, and all of them impacted; they had to slice the insides of my cheeks almost out to the skin to get at the back set, and sew them up from the inside so tightly I couldn't open my mouth more than half an inch afterward.

I did see a little bit of the beginning of it, when the sodium pentothal was still taking effect: I remember looking down at myself in the chair, as from a very great height, and thinking that someone down there must be in a hell of a lot of pain, and how very glad I was that I wasn't her. Weird stuff.

Interestingly enough, the dentist who removed my wisdom teeth showed me the instruments because I was curious and asked. My favorite was the little stainless crowbar.

I remember being perfectly lucid when the tooth-removing doctor leaned over and said, with Bad Tourist volume and enunciation, "Can. . .You . . . Understand . . .Me?"

In my head I told him "Yes, of course I can." My mouth said "Uuuughhra" instead. I thought Huh. The gas must be working after all. Then I passed out.

Glad Patrick made the appointment. I guess it's too late to refrain from telling horror stories, or describing instruments of torture, until after he actually goes.

When the time came to have them pulled, I got the full "Ooooh, prepare for pain and days of disability!" treatment.

I let my manager and co-workers know I would be out the rest of the day, and maybe the rest of the week. Then dentist wrote me a prescription for vicodin and gave me gauze to pack around the oozing chasms.

And . . . I went right back to work. Didn't need the gauze or the vicodin. I felt sore, but not disabled or even miserable.

I took the next day off anyway. :)

I think ethan just fainted.

"...Dr. Allan Feinstone had everything. A beautiful wife, a huge house, and a wonderful job of being a dentist. That is, until he finds out that his wife is having an affair with the pool boy, and now his mind has snapped. Any plaque, tooth decay, or bad breath can set off his mind, and now if you have a trip to the dentist, you better cancel it, unless you want to be dentally tortured..."

When I was in college a few years later, my roomie had two wisdom teeth pulled on Friday and two more on Monday. He was in agony all weekend and through Wednesday.

Thus I was terrified of the prospect of wisdom teeth extraction. Then I saw a dentist who said, "your orthodonist's foresight means your wisdom teeth are coming in fine. No worries, mate."

And it was true!

I think I'm glad that my fibre-optic nervous system means that I'll be getting my wisdom teeth out under *general* anaesthetic this month.

(Maybe it's not fibre-optic, perhaps: but can you think of another explanation for local anaesthetic having *no* anaesthetic effect whatsoever? They might as well have injected me with sterile saline.)

My wisdom teeth were simple extractions. They had erupted through the gums, and the roots were together. Every dentist described them as "ice cream cone shaped", which is apparently a technical term describing dentition. (??)

It took 45 minutes to finally numb me up so I couldn't feel anything. All 4 teeth were extracted in 12 minutes. Fairly painless. Thank goodness!

ethan, dentistry isn't all bad.

I have (had) those! I didn't realize there was a technical term; I refer to mine as "shaped like small party hats."

Aaaaaaaaaaaaah!!!
(Think he'll believe you?)

Actually, my own experiences were all painless, during each procedure and after it was over.

(I didn't get it. though.)

But...I had an impacted 6-year molar removed when I was about 14...

..by an oral surgeon named Dr. Looney.

However, if you get told that you have a cracked tooth that needs to come out, RUN - do not walk - to an oral surgeon. You don't want to be awake for this. Fractures often don't really show up very well, so what looks like two pieces or a simple crack can be a lot more than that. 3 hours in a chair just plain sucks. I almost felt sorrier for the dentists whose afternoon/early evening I shot to hell than I did for me - for about 2 minutes. Not their fault, they just didn't realize what they were getting into until they were already into it, and it was too late to stop.

I've had some bad experiences with the dentist but now I have a lovely woman who came highly recommended. Still, I'm so scarred from my previous experiences that I wish I could start the nitrous oxide before I leave the house. I tend to sit in the waiting room and snivel even though she's been very gentle with me. Luckily she's also quite understanding,

If you ask around, you can usually find dentists who specialize in patients with dental phobias and are good at it. This helped me get back into seeing the dentist after a number of years of not going at all, after my fears and stress level got out of whack. (That may have had something to do with my wisdom tooth extraction, which was rotated completely sideways, so they had to cut it up in place and remove it in chunks. Or maybe not, because it was mostly the routine cleanings that I was freaking out about.)

Since I found my specialist, who has some outstanding hygeinists, I've been going twice a year with no further traumas or mental problems and only minor filling work needed. Fortunately I'd grown up with fluoridated water and fluoride treatments and had good brushing habits, so my teeth hadn't deteriorated significantly during the years I wasn't going in for cleanings and checkups.

I get my teeth cleaned and checked twice a year. (It's never occured to me not to go -- except when I had no insurance.) I've had fillings replaced (One is Under Observation now.), and a mouth guard made.

That's it. Are you paying attention, Patrick and Ethan?

Oral surgeons are a goodness. About a year out of high school, I went for a long overdue dental check-up where the dentist decided that I really should get those two stubborn baby teeth out. He gave me the card of a surgeon. I went. There was plenty of novocaine and instruments that looked rather like needle nose pliers and a wrench. I heard the tooth snap from all the twisting the surgeon was doing, but didn't feel anything. It was neat.

I dug out the insurance info today (involved a trip across campus to HR) and will be making the appointment tomorrow.

Thanks for the kick in the pants!

Is this the place not to mention Arch Obler's A Trip To The Dentist? I thought so...

Sure, wisdom tooth removal can be nasty and leave you in serious pain for a week or so, but I've had the joyful experience of walking into a dentist's office (actually it was an oral surgeon) and having him tell me that I could look forward to years of agony.

See, I don't have any wisdom teeth. I also don't have three other adult teeth, and a fourth is only half the size of the space it's meant to fill.

This resulted in many years of orthodontia in middle school and early high school, and a retainer which I wore 20+ hours per day, mainly to maintain the gap on the upper right where we intended to put an implant once we were sure I'd stopped growing. Now I didn't wear this retainer out of any inherent virtue. Mostly I wore it because if I left it out for more than a couple hours at a time, it hurt like the dickens to put it back in. I could actually feel my teeth move in my jaw as I wedged the little fake tooth attached to the retainer back into its appointed space.

So junior year of college rolled around, and we were pretty well convinced I'd stopped growing some time around Sophomore year of high school, so I went in for a consultation with an oral surgeon on putting in an implant. I was promptly informed that while my retainer had done an admirable job of keeping the teeth apart, it had been remiss in dealing with the roots. See the implant is basically a screw placed into your jaw, with a fake tooth attached to the top. This screw is about 3 mm wide. The space between my roots was about 2.5 mm wide.

So as a junior in college, I got to get braces again.

Long story short, after 18 months of braces, two oral surgeries, one small bone graft, one false tooth shattered in my mouth, several weeks with a bare steel peg sticking out of my gums, one custom-built implant and about a millimeter sanded off of my bottom teeth to keep the implant from screwing up my bite I now have a full set of teeth.

Except for the two baby teeth on the bottom that are bonded to their neighbors and will rot out some day...

And the gap over on the top left...

...sigh...

Dentists tell me I have a big mouth.

But ask me some day about the anesthetics they use when they have to work on your retina. Totally aware. Totally didn't care. That was very disturbing. The follow-up injections were *much* worse.

They were taken out by my own dentist under a local, and the worst bit of it was having the injections. Other than that, didn't feel a thing. They hurt horribly while the local was wearing off, as far as I can tell mostly because the nerve objected to being hit with that much lignocaine, and then ached slightly for the rest of the day. By the time I'd been to the pharmacy to buy the codeine and then got home with it, I didn't need it any more.

The impacted wisdom tooth and the molar with the very deep cavity and possible crack, on the other hand, were done under a general. So I didn't have to be awake for the gruesome details the oral surgeon gave me later. "It fell apart as I pulled at it and I had to take it out piece by piece with a chisel."

Someone wave the smelling salts at ethan.

Making Light: Language, fraud, folly, truth, knitting, and growing luminous by eating light. Oh, and nagging about dental appointments. I love this place.

"...Dr. Caine, the murdering dentist from the original movie, has escaped from the mental hospital where he has been since being caught. Hoping to resume a normal life, he makes his way to a quiet Midwestern town under a false name and takes on the responsibilities of the town dentist Things are starting to look up for Caine, until the day when he catches his new love in the arms of someone else. Just as in the first movie, this sends him back over the edge and into another homicidal rampage, with his unfortunate patients bearing the brunt of his hostility..."

All right, everyone, get on with it. You know the drill.

Thanks to my untreated acid reflux, I now have a shiny new (expensive, time-consuming) crown on a back molar. And extra-strength toothpaste to prevent more teeth from rotting away while the acid reflux is being treated.

It had never occured to me, you see, that my heartburn had not only gone chronic but was having serious consequences.

I will not join the dental horror-fest by recounting the joys of being resodded and patched, but those procedures are very motivating incentives to get checked regularly.

C'mon, Susan. You know you want to. Besides, ethan expects no less from us.

Oh, and I have no problem going to the dentist. Every six months like clockwork (except that I had to cancel this visit because of stupid American lags in insurance-getting from job to job).

Serge #17 & 40: You are cruel. Cruel, cruel, cruel.

Time to pass out again. (thud)

You're welcome.

the feel of missing teeth - don't worry, it's just a soft pit when you poke it with your tongue. Follow the instructions the dentist gives you, and you shouldn't have problems. (Probably something will be said about rinsing your mouth with warm saltwater. Think chicken soup without chicken.)

When I did finally get them taken out, the extraction itself was fine — at least, I don't remember anything about it, so that's close enough to "fine" for me.

I got mine done under some sort of painkiller I can only describe as "Take this pill an hour before the appointment, then this other pill when you arrive." I was awake through the whole procedure, but not...quite...there. And very happy! I distinctly remember thinking, "Oh, hey, that sounds like they're cracking the tooth into pieces inside my mouth and then removing the shards. Cool!"

Afterwards I was incoherent from the drugs for the rest of the day, and back at work the day after being...very happy on Vicodin. Lovely stuff, that. Made me feel happy and floaty and all fine with the world.

Which is actually the part I consider a valuable learning experience about the whole thing. I was down to one pill left in my bottle of painkillers, and holding a prescription for a complete refill. The pain had subsided to the point where I could really deal with it with some ordinary ibuprofen. I looked at that last pill in the jar, and my brain went "GIMME" with such charming intensity it scared the shit out of me. I promptly threw away the last pill, shredded the prescription, and swapped to ordinary painkillers. Having my wisdom teeth out wasn't very scary. Realizing how easy it would be to just keep taking those happy pills was very, very scary indeed.

The sequel to my wisdom teeth story was fairly lurid. I didn't have a car, my boyfriend (later husband) didn't have a car, and we walked the almost mile to the surgeon's. I got out of the surgery, and had two tasks before I went home: get the painkillers at a nearby drugstore, and get some icecream at the grocery. We got through the pills part, but at the grocery I started feeling faint, and had to establish myself on a pile of fertilizer bags in front of the store while boyfriend called cab. (This is back in the 70s--no cell phones.) When the cab appeared, it drove around, decided it didn't see anyone who resembled a likely customer, and drove off. In the meantime, I began serious lapses into unconsciousness, punctuated by bloody drool. Finally some total gentleman of the old school volunteered himself to drive us home. He declined to give us his name, but I'm eternally grateful to him.

I took the next day off. Maybe the day after that. It turns out, via later experience, that I don't react well to any anaesthetic, which I really should have already figured out after I had a bad trip on laughing gas getting the chipped tooth fixed.

Oh yeah. I had an outpatient hernia operation and was prescribed 25-30 painkillers. I took two and decided I wanted no more of those; it felt like I lost way too much control.

(Being a smoker and, at the time, someone bordering on functional alcoholism, I knew I had an addiction-prone personality. I've since quit the booze.)

Awesome epiphenomenon of your mom being a Dental Assistant who knows the oral surgeon socially: we got to actually keep the offending teeth. (They dipped them in some kind of bleach solution first.)

I still haven't completely abandoned my plan of making a necklace from one.

Which told me that I'm a low risk for painkiller addiction, but probably a massive risk for stimulant addiction.

_____
* Tylox, aka oxycodone+acetaminophen.

I'd asked the dentist ahead of time if I could keep my teeth. The assistant thought it was weird, but the dentist was unruffled.

(I was the only one of us three who had his throaty-bits hacked out. Turns out that our family's twice-yearly strep infestation was all coming from somewhere back there, and none of us have contracted it in the 12 years since. My sister still says my tonsilectomy was the nicest present I ever gave her.)

The only time he got called for jury duty while we lived in KS, he wore that in one ear and an eyeball earring in the other ear. Otherwise he dressed respectfully. He got sent home during voir dire. Big fat surprise....

My dad always claimed the dog was my brother. Yeah, I've made all the jokes about that one. Anyway, the dog and I kept getting sick with hacking coughs. A tonsillectomy for the dog was $60*, one for me was more expensive. So, the dog's tonsils came out, we both stopped getting sick, and I still have my wee bits of lymphoid tissue.

*1977 dollars

Unfortunately, bacon doesn't go well with nitrous, and I got a bit nauseous. So no gas for me, just needles.

Have a taxidermist implant them in the jaws of some incongruous little critter - a roadkill rabbit with big honking human molars...

Have you got some sort of animosity toward future archaeologists? Some poor schmoe will waste at least an entire afternoon trying to figure out what the heck happened to that skull. Or, if it's post-apocalypse, an entire new origins legend will develop.

PS: If anyone wants to make some baby scorpion earrings, I have about 15 plump white newborn Emperor Scorpion babies that I'm not sure what to do with. ('Sautee' keeps coming to mind.)

Sometime in the intervening moves the teeth have been lost, alas.

This is starting to sound like something from John Lustig's Last Kiss Comics.

Pain-free dentistry. Interesting hypothetical concept.

I went to the dentist yesterday. Everything was fine, except for one old filling that has to be replaced.

I asked the dentist if having a filling replaced is more painful than getting a filling in the first place. He looked at me as though I were nuts and said, "New ones, old ones, it doesn't matter. You'll be totally numb and you won't feel a thing!"

I heart my dentist. Then again, talk to me next Friday.

I'm, er, agnostic. I wonder what PZ Myers of Pharyngula might make of his neighbor's art.

I remember remembering "100, 99, 98, 97..." Not sure about 96 and 95, but by "94" I was waking up.

As I remember, the greatest anguish was the looking like a Cabbage Patch Doll for a few days. Ubiquitous cameras weren't around then*, so there aren't any permanent records of said transformation.

The horse-pill sized codeine made the subsequent two days pass in a happy "Hey, does anything exist except the tip of my nose? Because I can only see the tip of my nose" blur.

----------
* Sad that they weren't, really, except in this one case. Back then I'd go on a trip and at best take 24 pictures a day, and most weren't good. Now I'll take that many in an hour, but I'm spending much less time thinking about photos, because of all the enabled-by-digital practice.

Piers Anthony wrote a novel about an interstellar dentist.

I can't wrap my mind around the idea. Truthfully. You might as well ask me to think of Katee Sackhoff as a Cabbage Patch Doll.

Suddenly I find myself thinking of a Cabbage-Patch-Doll version of Battlestar Galactica...

Piers Anthony wrote a novel about an interstellar dentist.

Avram Davidson wrote a short story about a dentist abducted by aliens to to take care of their awful, rotten teeth, who hides a message in a filling he deliberately installs badly so it will have to be taken out while the alien is on Earth. Help, I Am Dr. Morris Goldpepper

I like the idea of a Garbage Pail Kids BSG even better.

All this to say...

Sure, Patrick made an appointment, but did he actually go?

[Posted from 208.252.207.30]

Because the spammers can't handle the tooth?

¹ Until they found the nitrous oxide leak.