They're Wisdom Teeth Because They Make You Smart

[chomiji]

Woes. The Young Lady needs to get her wisdom teeth removed.

This isn't a big surprise (my husband and his sister, and I and my sister, all had to have that done), but it was already looking like a busy summer. And she's never had a serious medical procedure - not even a single stitch or an ilness worse than the flu in 16 years. So she's not feeling very brave about it.

Comments

[bad-mushroom.livejournal.com]

Heh, I have the same issue right now. 18 years without a surgical procedure or even blood drawn, and now, KAPOW, wisdom teeth next month.

[chomiji]

Awww ... well, most everyone in the country goes through it.   >hugs!<

She's had blood drawn a couple of time, though.

[bad-mushroom.livejournal.com]

Fortunately I only have three anyway. But god, I am a total wreck when it comes to medical things. They've tried to draw blood before but they actually COULD NOT because I was freaking out so much. Never again.

[chomiji]

I got pretty stoic by the time I was in my teens - I had horrible crippling cramps: a severe case of what they call spasmodic dysmenorrhea. And no one knew about ibuprofen as a treatment back then - I think it existed, but it was prescription-only and for arthritis and things. I learned to just go limp and ride through pain.

I was donating blood fairly regularly for a while there, but at the moment, they don't want my blood ... .

[bad-mushroom.livejournal.com]

It's not pain that bothers me, I'm just a bit squeamish.

Heh, well, hopefully that'll change soon :)

[chomiji]

> HUGS! <

[sanada.livejournal.com]

Awww, I hope she's doing okay! I probably ought to have mine removed too, but I'm a wuss!

[chomiji]

I think she's mostly over the formless worries stage. Karl tells us that after he had his done, when the doctor (or somebody) told him he had to take it easy because he was still woozy, Karl went and stood on his head to prove there was no need for concern! He was (and still is) such a boy!   XD

So she's hoping she'll be more like Dad and less like Mom. (I was laid up for several days.)

[chomiji]

I do indeed remember some nausea. I'm not at all prone to that - can count on the fingers of one hand how many times I've thrown up in adulthood - but I couldn't drink stawberry shakes or eat strawberry ice cream for years afterward because my Dad was dispatched on a late-night Mickey D's run to get me some shakes to drink, and strawberry was all they had ... .

[chomiji]

Funny - I never thought of it that way, because I'm definite;y affected by certain things. I get sympathetic pains when I hear about suffering in others, for example, and I have trouble getting gruesome scenes out of my mind. But I just don't react with nausea.

> huggles you <

[chomiji]

Ahhh ... my gastric disturbances tend to move, um, the other direction. Irritable Bowel Syndrome ... . And green peppers and raw onions make me very ill with cramping and gas (oddly enough, salsa with onions is OK ... the tomato and/or the cilantro seem to neutralize the onion).

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

Oh! Can I brag and tell my wisdom teeth removal under only novicane and laughing gas?

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

Wow. That sounds much more horrific than my first filling, which set the bar in my family for bad dental work. I second the importance of good people doing the work - the people who did my wisdom teeth were fantastic, and I know that's why it went so well.

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

Oh. My. God.

I would still be enraged about that too.

[chomiji]

Downtown here????

That's really appalling! Usually teaching hospitals are better because the doctors get asked questions and so actually have to think about what they're doing. But I guess there are exceptions to every rule. I'm just so sorry you had to deal with that!

[chomiji]

Karl went to Penn ... .

I used to take myself to GW when I needed emergency care, back before I had a car - when I sliced my hand open on a broken glass, for example, and when a bug flew into my eye and scratched my cornea. (I guess I should have included those in my list of incidents, below, but they weren't actual hospitalizations ... .) And I accompanied my parents (in the ambulance) to WHC and Suburban (in Bethesda), various times.

With the cornea incident, once I could see, I realized that the ophthalmological resident who was overseeing my treatment had been in my high school graduating class!

[chomiji]

Yeah, Fairfax is where they took me for the angioplasty. Arlington now has a big, modern cardiac center, but they didn't back then (1989). I was taken over in an ambulance - during rush hour! O.o; I was impressed by the ambulance crew: they were all of the same physical type, male and female, chunky, muscular, and not too tall, and all of the same blunt, rough-around-the-edges Gojyo-esque sympathetic personality.

[chomiji]

I guess I've just been very, very lucky. My first orthodontic extraction wasn't pleasant, but that's because they didn't tell me what was going to happen (I mean, I knew I was having teeth pulled, but they didn't go into any detail), just clapped a breathing mask over my face and held it there. My last memory is of them strapping my feet down because I was kicking them. (I was 9.)

But that was the only nastiness I've had, and I've had a total of three oral surgeries, two rather rude and not-for-polite-company surgeries on my posterior, a cyst removed from one breast, the lumpectomy and re-excision on the other, an angioplasty, and a childbirth ... there was some unpleasantness waiting around for the angioplasty (I needed to be transferred to a bigger hospital, but they didn't have a bed right away), but it wasn't from any particular stupidity, just bureaucratic idiocy and my own precarious condition.

My main problem right now is trying to schedule the procedure. Summer looks real short when you've got 3 weeks of your own vacation plans, two weeks of your backup's, 4 weeks of theater camp, and a week when your backup will be working abbreviated days because her musician-househusband will be teaching a fiddle workshop and she needs to take their kid to and from daycamp ... . And during the only really "open" week, some overseas neilgaimanboard members will be in town, and she's livid at the idea that the surgery might in any way prevent her from meeting them ... we should all have such problems, I know.

[chomiji]

XD

I'll tell her!

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

All the dental assistants were really impressed. Also, to brag about how awesome they were, one of them held my hand while it was being done, just because. For a minute, under the drugs, I thought my mom had snuck back into the room.

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

It was! And really brought home the importance of having good people working on you.

The horror story was this:

I go in for my first filling (at, like 13, and I was so disappointed because I'd never had a cavity until then) and the dentist gives me laughing gas without asking my mother (who wasn't there, she'd dropped me off).

Now, I found out later (when I got my wisdom teeth out) that too much laughing gas makes one feel out of control - at the time I thought I was getting really anxious because I felt like I was floating above my body, and was very calm as they drilled and probed. I knew I would normally be much more bothered by this, and the fact that I wasn't freaked me out. While this was going on, I was also chewing the hell out of my numb inner cheek and lip. I ripped the skin all the hell, and when I got out, my lip looked like I'd been punched in the face.

Also, the dentist was so ham-handed that my filling was sensitive to cold for about, oh, three years. I'm not kidding. I had to be careful to put ice cream and cold drinks on the left side of my mouth because it I didn't it would fill like the liquid was poured inside my tooth. (unpleasant.)

To make matters worse (this is where me and my mother start screwing up) after this I had to take the bus to Tae Kwon Do practice, and then AFTER that mom made me go to this (unitarian universalist) church thing, because we had missed the last week of whatever thing we were doing. (At which no one asked me how I was, when, as I said, my mouth was puffed up all to hell.)

Mom still gets furious at the dentist for giving me drugs without her permission, herself for not being there with me and making me go to church afterward.

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

It was not fun.

[chomiji]

OK, now I'll stop feeling overly protective about the way I always stay with the Young Lady when she's having dental/orthodontic care.

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

Oh, you are SO not overprotective for doing that.

[chomiji]

Heh ... I figured that at some point, it would be "Mom! Gimme some privacy here!"

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

Well, when/if that happens, then you can start letting her go on her own.

[chomiji]

Sound advice ... .

:-)

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

[chomiji]

Hmm, I wasn't sick very often when I was a kid - my sister was the one with the tonsillitis and all that crud - and we belonged to Group Health, which was essentially an early HMO. My pediatrician, Dr. Diamond, was this grumpy slightly creepy gnomelike guy ... I was just as glad not to see him alone. Care's doctor is a woman of roughly my age, also a mother, whom Care likes well enough to insist on seeing (vs. any other doctor in the practice) even though she;s in only 2 days a week.

Our dentist was likewise a grumpy old fashioned guy - we never had novocaine ... .

[chomiji]

My teeth were a horrendous mess - some of the lower incisors were so crowded that they had turned at right angles to the others. Nowadays they usually treat that with "palate expanders" that take advantage of a young child's skeletal flexibility to make more room (as long as the bone structure seems to support it), but I had extractions twice before I had braces, and I'm missing my bicuspids as a result.

Originally my regular dentist was going to do the extractions, but as mentioned, he'd never used Novocaine on us before, and when he came at me with this enormous syringe, I freaked out so badly that he gave up (and thereafter I had the experience with the oral surgeon that I described previously).

[chomiji]

That is pretty impressive! The time I was in intensive care, I got this poor male nurse to hold my hand ... I felt bad about it later on but I was very scared and lonely. Intensive care is not very nice when you're not drugged out of your mind!

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

It certainly is not!