41: In Which I Did Not Get My Grading Done, But I Did Get Shots In My Mouth

Today I went to the dentist, positive that I had either a wisdom tooth coming in or a terrible cavity on the verge of being abscessed. Even now, years after my first and only root canal, the word 'abscess' inspires panic and cold sweats. I am not sure which was worse, the days I had to wait before my root canal, or the procedure itself. I remember writhing on my bed in pain, choking on globs of Orajel, popping pain relievers, and marathon-watching episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender, which I had recently discovered. Sometimes I had to pause the episode that I was watching so that I could cry and groan through a particularly intense throb of pain.

As a veteran of both, I can safely say that the excruciating crescendo to oral surgery and the labor before childbirth are not dissimilar. The payoff in giving birth is obviously superior; you are presented with your child, but the cessation of pain in the bloody aftermath of a root canal (I cannot understate the bloody) is nothing to sneeze at.

So I spent the day imagining all sorts of terrible prognoses: another abscess. A wisdom tooth that required immediate extraction. Any and everything that would involve only the worst instruments of torture in any dentist's arsenal: needles, those wicked sharp bastardizations of toothpicks that look like they should not go anywhere near a human mouth, and its sadistic older cousin that sprays a high powered jet of water so laser-focused that I always clench my eyes shut in anticipation of my tongue being shorn clean off when a nurse inevitably trips and stumbles into the dentist while he's poised over my mouth. Operating lethal machinery with all the vulnerable frailty that humanity affords his naked hands.

I waited about an hour in the waiting room, my annoyance a billowing cloud that rapidly dissipated upon discovery of an outlet behind my chair. I should have been grading essays, as grades are due tomorrow morning and I have an infant who makes it nearly impossible to be productive when she is awake, but I have poor decision-making skills. Like, it didn't even occur to me to get some work done while I waited. Only now, in the retelling, do I realize the extent to which I wasted that time. So it wasn't so much a decision as a negligent disposition. And now, on the train, I continue the trend by writing about it, rather than putting my phone away and doing the damn grading. But, I digress.

The nurse finally led me to the back and subjected me to an X-Ray so that the dentist could tell me that there was nothing out of place. I had some inflammation in my gums, probably due to food getting in the space around my wisdom tooth, which caused the irritation. I got a local anesthetic and he did a deep cleaning, then a command to rinse with warm salt water for the next few days. The whole affair took about five minutes, not counting numbing time.

So, to recap:
- Thanks to some space around the wisdom tooth I do indeed have, but do not have to have extracted,
- Food was able to burrow in and cause me enough pain to compel me to make a dentist appointment,
- At which appointment I would receive SHOTS in my MOUTH, and in my GUMS specifically, which hurts, if that wasn't already clear,
- So that I could receive the water jet of doom, and risk losing all or a portion of my tongue,
- To clean out some old food from around a tooth that is not actually abscessed, which should be a comfort, but I didn't even get to see it, which would have been gross, probably, but undoubtedly satisfying.

Anyway, the whole thing was embarrassingly anticlimactic, which is naturally why I've decided to make it the subject of today's entry, and also why I scheduled a cleaning for three weeks from now.