The Extraction

It’s funny how things tend to come full circle, isn’t it? The first blog post I ever wrote was about five years ago and stemmed from a root canal gone wrong. If you want to read about it, here she be.

I blogged regularly for a while, but life caught up to me and I haven’t put fingers to keys in like a year.

Well, for those of you who have been pining for some BigFunnyBlog, you’re in luck. Because yesterday I woke up with the worst fucking toothache in the world.

The culprit, ironic enough as it is, was the very same root canal tooth that started this whole blog thing. It seemed that whenever I bumped it, or bit down, or breathed, a lightning bolt of throbbing pain would shoot through my face like I had just been shot with a bazooka. I’ve obviously never experienced childbirth before, but I have to imagine the pain I was feeling was exactly like that, only instead of a baby I was pushing out a giant inflamed gnarled tooth. Oddly enough, it did have my complexion.

Believe it or not, the pain was so bad that I couldn’t even eat. That’s right — me, couldn’t eat. You know I’m in rough shape when I’m passing up a meal. Although the search history on my phone will show that I did Google “Intravenous cheeseburger” just to see what would come up.

The pain I felt made sleep last night a pipe dream and I even made a 2 a.m. trip to Walgreen’s in an attempt to find something, anything, to dull the pain. But no amount of Orajel, essential oils, or peroxide rinse could fix it. Shit, at one point I even mixed together a blend of salt, pepper, and vegetable oil and stuck that on my tooth hoping it would help. It didn’t, but I now have a great rub for a pork roast.

Funny side note, I actually applied some toothache medicine in the parking lot of Walgreen’s, but when I got home I dropped the tiny little bottle down the crack of my seat. So there I am at 2:30 in the morning in my driveway with a flashlight and a screwdriver trying to fish out a little bottle of medicine that didn’t work while tears streamed down my face from the pain I was in. Oh happy day.

Thank God I was able to get into the dentist today because I’m pretty sure I was about 10 minutes from going all Tom Hanks Castaway and knocking my tooth out with an ice skate. I didn’t have an ice skate, though. Only a roller blade.

I went to the dentist in the afternoon and got an X-ray which was super easy if you consider gagging so hard you almost shit yourself “easy.” Did I mention that I have a gagging problem? That’s why I hate the dentist. Just thinking about having all those instruments in my mouth makes me start retching.

My dentist proclaimed the tooth in question had “split like a piece of firewood” inside of my gum and had filled up with all kinds of bacteria and amoebas and what not that were now trying to kill me. He recommended I go on antibiotics for a couple of days and then come back and have it removed.

I recommended he go fuck himself with that kind of plan.

Couple of days? My tooth is literally beating inside of my mouth like a tiny little heart and he wants me to come back in a couple of days? He told me the reasoning was because it may be hard to numb the affected area and there could be considerable pain during the procedure. Sure, that makes sense. We don’t want you to be in considerable pain so we’re going to send you home in considerable pain and bring you back in 48 hours.

“I’ll take my chances with the agonizing procedure,” I tell him.

At that point he fires a bunch of Novacaine into my mouth with a tiny little needle which felt like a flirtatious tickle compared to what I’d been going through. Three minutes after that, the whole right side of my face was numb and for the first time in 24 hours I didn’t have to pull mounds of pubic hair out of my taint to distract myself from the pain in my mouth. I was on cloud nine!

What happened after that is best described as a cross between a tooth extraction and replacing a bad muffler on a ’92 Buick Century Station Wagon. He warned me I might “hear some noises,” but that was a bit of an undersell as I hear the sound of my tooth cracking apart and a giant piece of it tumbling into the back of my throat. I, of course, start gagging and the poor hygienist is trying to suck the tooth up with her dentist sucker-ma-bob but the piece was so big that it sounded like she was trying to pick up a pile of Legos with a Dyson vacuum cleaner.

“Sorry about that,” my dentist says casually, as if he accidentally bumped into my cart at the grocery store instead of almost choking me to death with a piece of my own infected tooth.

The rest of the procedure was him using a variety of science fiction instruments in an attempt to yank pieces of my broken tooth out of my face with the delicacy of a drunk uncle trying to fix a bad hot water heater. He stopped just short of putting both of his feet on my face and pulling with two hands, but I’m pretty sure he used a crescent wrench and some WD-40 at one point.

While this was happening I kept thinking, “Is this normal,” which was eventually answered when my dentist said, “This isn’t normal,” in reference to the amount of time and effort it was requiring to pull my tooth. I even heard him mumble to himself, “This is one of the trickiest ones I’ve ever done,” which isn’t exactly comforting when you know your dentist has been working on teeth since the Regan administration. I kid you not, eventually he just said, “You know, I’m gonna go ahead and leave that last part in there,” and he sews me back up like that in episode of Seinfeld when they dropped a Junior Mint into someone’s body cavity during a surgery and left it.

When done, the hygienist showed me a picture of my tooth, which looked like it had been extracted with an IED.

Believe it or not, though, that was the easiest part for me. What came next was the required gauze packing which sent me into Gag-a-thon 2017. It didn’t matter how numb my face was, every time the hygienist stuck it in my brand new tooth gap I gagged it back up in a bloody mound of gauze and shame.

“Try to hold it in there for at least 10 minutes,” she says to me. Twelve seconds later, I’m puking it up onto my own lap.

“Well, I guess you can just go home then,” she replied and $125 later I was on my way out the door with blood dripping out of my numb mouth like it was Halloween and I was going as a “Fat, ginger-bearded vampire with tears coming down his face.” I can only imagine the candy I could have gotten!

The rest of my afternoon went about as expected as I went through a box-and-a-half of gauze trying to force myself to pack it while simultaneously gagging so hard I was afraid I was going to pass out. But hey, at least the pain was gone!

Well, that is until the Novacaine wore off. And while I would have expected that process to happen gradually, it actually happened instantly and just like that I was dealing with the pain of an infected tooth combined with the pain of a dentist jackhammering away at my face. I spent the rest of the evening binge eating Norco out of a Pez dispenser while trying to decide if I wanted my first meal in 24 hours to be water or chicken broth.

So yeah, I hope you enjoyed my first blog post in forever and that you share it with all your friends so they can also enjoy my pain.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go take some Norco and grab the bouillon cubes.

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