Al Dente

After 30 hours, the bleeding has mostly stopped. The bleeding, of course, coming from the big hole in my mouth where my wisdom tooth used to be. This tooth had gone rogue and had to be eliminated as an example to the others. It didn’t go without a fight. It adopted a ‘scorched earth’ policy and left a hole that required three stitches to close, and still bled for more than a day.

Now it just hurts.

I was not nervous going into the dentists’ as I had not been thinking about the extraction. The dentist came to the waiting room before I even sat down and within a minute I was in the chair. She frowned a bit as she looked at the x-ray, “this one might be difficult“. The chair was tilted back. I knew what was coming up. The Needle. I have heard from many people that the injection of the anaesthetic is the worst part of dental surgery, and that is partly true. The injection is the worst part of the surgery. The worst part of the surgery experience is when the anaesthetic wears off. The needle was unpleasant, but I wouldn’t say that it hurt. It was just a bit worse than a blood test.

Once I was suitably numb the extraction commenced. It is all grunt work, using an array of different types of pliers (she called them forceps, but I knew what they really were). After over thirty minutes of wrenching, including a short break, the dentist stood back with a satisfied smile and a tooth in her pliers. Because I was totally numb, I had no idea that she had been successful until I saw the tooth, and then only briefly. She quickly took the tooth away to show off to her other dentist mates. Either my tooth was particularly exciting, or they do this for every patient so that they feel special. My gnarled tooth doesn’t look like the smiling teeth on toothpaste tubes, so perhaps it was the former.

After showing off my tooth, the dentist returned to find that I was bleeding a little too much for her liking, so she stitched the wound closed. That didn’t help, so she stitched it again. And again. The bleeding slowed a bit and she was satisfied, but as I said before the bleeding didn’t stop for over 30 hours. An interesting observation: They don’t get some thread and a needle, and put the thread through the needle. The needle and the thread come pre-threaded, in little individual serve sterile packs.

Anyway, here is the tooth. I wish I had an SLR, this photo took far too much effort to create.

Pretty, isn’t it?