Had some oral surgery yesterday. Now I have the wonderful taste of Novocain, metal and blood in my mouth.
Many years ago I got a crown done by an Army dentist (yes, I spent 4 years in the military, but that’s another series of blog posts). As one might expect, it didn’t go as well as it should have. Turns out, he never put a post in and the tooth collapsed on itself.
Flashforward a couple of decades and I get an infection in that very same poorly crowned tooth. Not only is there a massive lump in my mouth, but there’s some great pain going on. I was out of town at a conference, so I called my dentist and had a prescription for antibiotics called in to a pharmacy a couple of blocks away from where I was staying.
I’m getting to the point, bear with me.
It was well over a week before I could get home and be seen to have the tooth extracted. Since it was an extraction of a crown, my dentist sent me over to a periodontist because this was going to be ugly. And it was. What should have taken an hour took nearly 3 and instead of the usual 1 and a half doses of Novocain, I had 5 full tubes used, which equates to around 15 injections. And I’m phobic of needles.
While I knew that it would be a rough extraction, not even the periodontist expected the tooth to be as stubborn as it was. Part of why I wound up getting an infection was the tooth had shattered underneath the gum line, so there were splinters and slivers that needed to come out.
Anyway – the tooth came out, and the gap healed nicely. Now I’m sitting here 4 years later finally getting around to doing something about filling the gap in my mouth. I’m not going to go into the reasons for the procrastination. It’s not really a big deal, but suffice to say that I was luck in that my other teeth haven’t started moving around to try and fill in the gap where the missing tooth used to be.
So yesterday I (finally) got the first step done. Back to the periodontist, and several shots of Novocain, an X-ray, and… well… the implant is in. Needless to say my jaw hurts. I was going to take a picture of the area before and after, sort of as proof as to what was going on, but then I’d have to look at the pictures in order to get them uploaded. I don’t particularly want to see them. The whole tooth thing creeps me out. Seriously. When my kids lose teeth I shudder, literally. I can’t watch them wiggle their teeth in order to get them out. This isn’t any sort of phobia like needles, just a gross out thing that I don’t particularly like going through.
Now I get to go back next week to make sure that everything is healing properly. I spent a good deal of yesterday having the taste of Novocain, blood and metal in my mouth. It wasn’t until later that night when I went out to dinner that I was finally able to begin to feel normal. Though that might have something to do with the two margaritas I had.