Friday was an interesting day. I stop popping Motrin for a little while (It’s really impressive though how ibuprofen and acetaminophen can have such different actions. Acetaminophen does wonders for me on the rare occasions that I get headaches and ibuprofen does an amazing job on bone/muscle pain. However, the other combination doesn’t seem to be nearly as effective.) and head to the oral surgeon. He does a panoramic x-ray and looks in my mouth. “Yup, I can see why that tooth is hurting.” Shows me the x-ray, “If you had just a couple more millimeters to your jaw, those bottom wisdom teeth would fit. But see how they tilt forward? Because of that, you can’t clean behind them and you’re going to run into decay problems. It’s not a big problem, but we don’t want the decay to spread to the teeth you need to keep.”
That gets followed by “When do you want to take them all out?”
My answer was “not today” and we compromised on doing the bottom ones in the spring and the hurty one now. Tooth extraction is actually kind of impressive, at least in cases where the tooth has successfully erupted. It’s just two shots of novocaine, open wide, a little bit of torquing and prying with pliers, and you’re done. I got a prescription for some serious painkillers, but ended up only taking more Motrin. Actually, a smaller dose of Motrin than I was taking for the hurting tooth.
I got a chance to check out my tooth too. By the time your teeth actually start hurting, they’re seriously fucked up. It was actually kind of impressive, I was having trouble with food getting stuck between my teeth and it’s because the wisdom tooth had a huge fucking hole in it.
So yeah, spring break fun getting out the bottom two. They want to do sedation for that though, and I’m frankly more worried about the anesthetic than I am the extraction. I should look back a year in the blog, I’m pretty sure I’ve said this before.