I've been stacking up mid-game experiences lately:
1. Getting my first mortgage. Talking with mortgage counselors, contractors, lawyers and other grown up people.
2. My eyes have weakened, I guess. Now I need reading glasses. But mostly they don't move around as smoothly as before unless I focus on letting the eye muscles relax.
3. Almost all new pop music sounds bad. Just bad.
4. I play tennis with a cop, which sounds like the premise for a Seinfeld episode.
Yesterday I was blessed with oral surgery to cleanup and remove a stubborn infection below the roots of my four lower front teeth. You might surmise that this was unpleasant. You would be correct.
It was not unpleasant because the surgery itself was painful. I received multiple Novocain injections both in front of and in back of my front teeth and also at the base of my lower lip. So I was completely numb, to a considerably greater degree than ever before. My lower lip felt like the pics one sees of botched collagen injections. My lower face was so numb that when the surgical assistant gave me some water to rinse my mouth, attempting to do so resulted in all the water shooting out of my mouth onto the surgical bib. Most embarrassing.
The unpleasantness was from the time involved - almost two hours - and the feeling of pressure against my gums and jaw that left my jaw aching by the time she was done. Feeling her scraping away at the roots of my teeth didn't hurt but it felt really weird, like vibration in the jawbone. There are a lot of nerves below the roots and again, there was no pain, but when one was touched I felt the most bizarre tingling sensations down my neck and into my shoulders and arms. It was also somewhat disconcerting to see how much blood was being sucked up out of my mouth through the transparent suction tube.
The aftermath sucks worse. Today I feel like someone punched me in the chin. I'm living on 3 Advil every 3 hours. I have to hold an icepack against the area for 20 minutes as often as I can. Otherwise there could be severe swelling and bruising. The written instructions they give you state that you often hurt worse two or three days after the surgery than on the next day. I also can't eat anything but soft, mild foods until the stiches are removed next Wednesday. Definitely nothing crunchy at all, which might tear out the stitches.
On the plus side, Dr. Kilbride was great. That's the only positive. That and I suppose I won't continue to have recurring gum infections.
Shared tip: vodka straight from the freezer is a wonderful numbing agent.
