Sometimes A Blood Clot Is A Good Thing

WARNING: The following blog entry contains details of my last dental visit. If you have a dental phobia stop right now! Here's a site with cute pictures of little puppies. Come back here in a day or two and hopefully there will be an entry not dental related.


Well, the Evil Tooth From Hell is gone. At least, it's out of my jaw. Now it's in a little envelope on the corner table. The dentist showed me why it was hurting. It has a crack going down into the root area. I don't know if it had been there for a while, or if the tooth got cracked when I had my last bunch of fillings put in. All I know is the tooth is out. It didn't hurt very much to get it pulled out. The dentist shot me up real good with novicane. Novicane is a good thing. I like novicane. It makes everything all numb and puffy feeling.

I could feel it when he was pulling it out, but it wasn't a major pain, just a kind of pulling, ripping feeling. I was actually surprised when the dentist said he was done because it didn't hurt nearly as much as I thought it would. He said it was easy to pull out because it was already a little loose. It was really loose last weekend when my jaw swelled all up. I could tell that tooth was popped up higher than normal. I bet he could have pulled it out with a pair of tweezers.

So now I'm sitting on the couch, trying to avoid drooling on my keyboard. I have a list of dos and don'ts. Some of them don't matter, like not smoking, since I don't smoke anyway. I also can't drink alcohol, but I'm not much of a drinker anyway. I don't think I even drank anything on New Year's Eve. The only thing that is bugging me is not being able to drink soda. I think the carbonation would mess with the gaping hole in my jaw. I also can't drink hot tea, which sucks because I really like hot tea. And I can't drink anything out of a straw. The dentist said suction was a bad thing. I think that might be why he said not to smoke.

So anyway, I'm sitting here now with a piece of gauze mashed up where the tooth used to be. I have a pile of little gauze strips that I'm supposed to roll up, soak in water, and mash into the hole. I am supposed to change gauze pieces every 20 minutes. This is supposed to help form a blood clot where the tooth used to be. The dentist said a blood clot is a good thing because if there isn't a blood clot the exposed jaw bone would hurt, and pain is bad. Let me tell you, pain is bad. Trust me, I've felt enough pain in that part of my mouth. I don't want any more.

So I'm doing the gauze thing, sipping a glass of water, and trying to decide if I feel like eating anything. The dentist said I could eat anything I feel like. Well, as long as it isn't too hot or cold, and I'm not supposed to chew on that side of my mouth, which isn't any hardship since I haven't been able to chew on that side of my mouth for about a month it seems. It takes twice as long to eat when you can only use half of your mouth. I planned ahead and had a nice breakfast since I didn't know if I would be up to eating anything after the yankage. I have some pain pills, but right now I'm all numbed up from the novicane so I don't need them.

Of course, I plan on milking all the sympathy out of my husband and The Girl that I can. As far as they are concerned, I plan on being in absolute agony in a couple of hours. I don't know how I am going to convince them that I'm in too much pain to do the laundry, but I plan on trying. Luckily, my husband doesn't read this. I'm not sure about The Girl, but I think by the time she gets around to reading this I'll already be well enough to resume my matronly chores.