It has been almost a week since the extraction of my lower wisdom teeth; if you were to ask me beforehand if I would still be taking pain medication, I would have laughed at you and given you a nougy (not only am I a poor speller in formal English, my lack of skill spills over into the colloquial.)  For some reason my right tooth did not want to go quietly into the night.

Let me back up; the sleepy-time medicine did not work for me nor did the laughing gas–I am sure I could still do long division and differential equations if I had a graphing calculator.  Luckily the novacain worked.  The left tooth was no problem, but the right tooth put up a fight; in an act of selfishness, the tooth somehow nicked my artery and made me bleed…real bad.  Did I mention it was about 5:45 pm at this point?  The normal time for dentists and oral surgeons to go home.  After some phone calls, my dentist got me into an oral surgeon.  Sara drove me to Mill Creek–from Everett–to have an oral surgeon’s assistant pull all the gauze out of my mouth and cause it to fill with blood–hmm, this man was sent because the dentist could not stop the bleeding, maybe some care would be part of the protocol.  After vacuuming blood from my mouth, packing the hole with bone wax, and sewing it shut the oral surgeon insisted that I go the the ER to make sure I did not lose too much blood (ETA is about 8:00 pm.)

By the time we arrived at the ER, I felt like I needed some pain medication.  I have a fairly high tolerance for pain–partly because I hate pain medication–but I knew after all of the finagling that happened in my jaw that I needed some medicine.  On arrival my pain level was at a 2.  By 10:40 pm when the nurse finally gave me two Percocet my pain level rose to about a 7.

Had I known that I would be forced into the black hole of medical care, I would have had them put me out to take out my wisdom teeth.  Many people learn something after such a traumatic experience, the only thing that I learned: Percocet does not constipate you like Vicodin.