Just in time for my birthday (October 15th), I suffered through one of the longest, most painful and traumatic weekends of my entire life.


                Milky Way by Babak A.Tafreshi


No surprise there.  Every October, the cosmos have a unique way of bestowing me with unusually awful birthday gifts.  A few small, uber thoughtful ones follow which help to forget the terror-filled trials but still.  Without fail, from a nasty elderly woman's attitude to people who completely forget that I'm alive, I often find myself in the shoes of Lucille Ball on I Love Lucy.  And Maybe there's a reason for that such as F me since I shouldn't receive gifts just because I'm here.  Maybe I should get off the birthday gravy train. 

Fine.  Totally understood.  
                            Stuff Stick Figure People Like


Yet, if the cosmos are so keen on granting me such a practical and divine perspective on life, one that I already live considering the wants I don't want and the needs I enjoy, why not just shove all my gifts-- horrible ones especially-- up their asses?  Huh?  All of them, from the death of a loved one to the cuddly Ty puppy.  They can keep them safe and warm that way.  That'll deprive me... and simultaneously keep the cosmos from indulging in an annual  belly laugh at my expense.

This year's unusually awful gift was ultra-memorable.  Six-month-old dry socket that came wrapped in excruciating pain.  A fun one to tear into, really.  I mean, at first I thought it was an infection based on the fact that despair pushed me into a blanket which muffled my wailing in agony.  But lo' and behold, it was just dry socket disguised as delayed healing and hyper-sensitivity to cold absent of pus-like grossness for half a year wreaking havoc in a very well-cared-for mouth!

Yep.  Just dry socket.

Silly me.

AUGH. 

Thursday night was my last straw when it came to this unbearable torture.  And my husband's.  He could no longer see me in pain.  Pain that gradually worsened over the course of three days, popping in at random hours of evening, practically devouring my soul.  I wanted to be a hero about the whole thing, waiting for it to go away while burying my head and screams and tears and snot in blankets and pillows.  I'd only been challenged by a hint of difficulty breathing otherwise so, for a short time, it was no big deal.

But, alas, so much for being a hero.  My pooky-savior took me by the hand and brought me to my dentist for an immediate emergency evaluation turned surgery.  Of course, the pain faded away at that point.  Of course.  I had to describe my situation as best I could without shivering and bursting into tears in front of her.  With a deep breath, I admitted that the pain worsened since I'd last seen her and that I triedtobeaheroaboutit.  Like the time a series of grueling menstrual cramps caused by high levels of stress from one of my former jobs made me feel like I was giving birth.  And the time that my mother and brother passed within six months of each other and I suffered in silence for a long time thereafter in utter hatred of the world around me.  And the time I had obnoxious, explosive diarrhea at work and didn't say anything to my superiors until my full day was done.  And the time that one of my former closest friends (Victoria) got drunk with a guy I was kinda seeing (Douchebag) and sort of went back to his place for a massage and... other stuff and then, the next day, told me what a asshole he was...

Bitch. 

(I puked away their companionship after that.)

I didn't exactly give my dentist those or any other similar examples of suffering in silence and my attempts at being a great big hero back then.  But I did tell her that I didn't understand what was happening in my mouth.  What the flying F was happening in the depths of the back upper-left quadrant?  Why was there a hole in my gums so irate when all the stumps where other wisdom teeth once lived were on their best behavior?  This was bull.

"Might be dry socket..." she said.

And she went into my upper left quadrant with her frigid little dental mirror in tow.  There, she found some inflammation.  Then she poked the area where a clot should've been with a second silver tool and it bled back at her. 

Needless to say, that wasn't a good response.  So she took X-rays of the area. 

Looking closely at the resulting images, we discovered a dark area in the hole, between some bone mass.  Conclusion?  None.  Great.  It was either an infection or dry socket.  Thing was, dry socket typically developed a short time after the removal of a wisdom tooth, as in a week or two afterward, not six months.  Meanwhile, an infection can be really gross-looking and moist and filled with stuff, but there was nothing to gag at or drain from my hole.

(I know.  It's kinda funny reading "hole" for some of you.  I know.) 

(Control yourselves.)

My dentist alerted me that she was "officially going in".  Excellent.  Really looked forward to that.  As an alternative, she could have shot me with a 36-barrel machine gun as that would have freed me of the grips of debilitating oral horror, inadvertently turning me into an art project.  However, knowing her, she probably had as clean a criminal record as I do and a better victim would likely grace her later in her life, a dumbass that she would do away with in an act of self-defense since the amount of dumbasses is staggering on this planet. 

Staggering. 

Anyhoo, I settled for a rubbing of my gums with a pea-sized amount of interesting-tasting numbing gel on a Q-tip that would prepare me for a few injections and sprinkles of cold anesthetic.


                                                      


I didn't feel the injections at all.  Probably because I'd already felt so much pain that injections had become kisses of the Gods.  Or probably because the numbing gel worked for the first time in my life.  But the scraping of my six-month-old scab I did feel and hear and, while it wasn't painful, it gave me the ultimate of all heebs, superseding the kind I got from watching five minutes of the disgustingly scary movie, The Dentist, on a boring afternoon after channel-surfing like an idiot.

No, I wasn't in pain during the procedure.  At least not until a gush of cold water penetrated the new cave in my mouth, rinsing it out.  My.  God.  If that wasn't the harshest form of punishment available on Earth, I didn't know what was.  It was the equivalent of receiving a huge electric shock into my head via my gums except that, unfortunately, I didn't die.  Instead, I somewhat successfully withheld a jump from my seat in the middle of the brief gush, imagining what I would have done to the water gun if I'd gotten my hands on it.

My dentist stopped rinsing.
 
"OK, OK," she gently assured me with a pat on my shoulder, "we're done here.  No more cold water for you." 

In an effort to curb my true feelings, I covered my face with my hands for a few seconds, bit my lip and mentally yelled "MOTHERF*CKEEEEER".  And ever so slowly, the shock went away.  And the pain went away.  And I felt so much... better?



                                              Gardens by Grace


The dentist followed up with the application of a brown paste that smelled like nutmeg into my hole. 

(I know, I know.  "Hole" is still so funny!) 

(Whatever.) 

She hated the stuff but I loved it.  It was the only thing I loved while seated on that purple recliner.  At first I thought that the paste smelled like Ben-Gay.  But after careful analysis, I determined that it smelled like nutmeg.  And, even better, it didn't taste like ass.

"Now this," she said, "should help you to heal rather quickly-- if it's dry socket, which all the symptoms are pointing to."

She was just about 100% sure that it was, and so was I.  In fact, I even hoped that it was dry socket and not something worse. 

"It's going to be sensitive up there..." she continued.

What she meant to say at the time was that the hole once inhabited by a 3 mm thick scab would become so painful during the course of three nights that suicide would be a healthful and forgivable way of dealing with it.  What she meant to say was that Percocet, the joke of an Oxycodone and Acetaminophen mash-up prescribed to me, was, at best, going to calm my nerves and put me to sleep.  What she meant to say was that this was going to be one of the greatest physical tests of my life; that the throbbing would continue and it would attack my left ear, cheek, jaw, neck and left shoulder in the process; that I would continue to overload my pillow and blanket and bed with slobber and tears and snot until no square inch of dryness was left and only Tide would spare it; that I would awaken my upstairs neighbor with my scary 1:00 AM, 2:00 AM, 3:00 AM and 4:00 AM howling outbursts; that those howling, hourly outbursts would turn into episodes of agony every fifteen minutes on Saturday night, making my night "hotter" than yours ever will be; that it would seem as though there would be no light at the end of my dark tunnel and that I would, therefore, call out to my dead mother with arms outstretched; and that whenever my husband would ask me if I needed anything, I'd reply with "death, with a side of now."

My dentist did, however, say that the "sensitivity" would dissipate in a couple of days.  And even if I didn't believe her on Saturday night into Sunday (or Thursday night into Friday, or Friday night into Saturday), even if I'd become the angriest king of this jungle I call "me", even if I felt that I could no longer go on with the worst luck to ever befall anyone,...  It was exactly what happened.  

By Sunday afternoon, I felt better though, in spite of that dissipation of pain (with the exception of a "bruised" jawbone), the poor tooth which fell neighbor to the scene of the crime was pounding lightly.  Just like my heart.  Fast, but lightly.  The thing was as traumatized as I.  But the good news?  We two began to trust our dentist again.  She was right.  A couple of days of torture had passed and, not only were we still alive, we wanted to live.  The sun was shining brightly.  We would get better.  We would feel better.  And that was that. 

Then, on Monday morning, I actually felt 100% better.  My tooth felt better.  My hole felt better. ("Hole" is funny!)  My spirit wanted me to streak through town.  And the dentist, at a follow-up visit that very morning, confirmed that what I suffered from was, indeed, dry socket.  The irritated area, she explained, went from red to pink and a lovely clot had formed, which was precisely what she'd hoped to find.  



                                                         


Most importantly, the son-of-a-bitch storm was over.  And my good health and undying radiant optimism-- yep, I save my craptales for you-- were back,... just in time for my birthday.