I am one of those lucky fools who never got widom teeth. Most of my Dad’s side of the family is lucky like this.
Wow, I hate having major dental work done. I love getting my teeth cleaned though. I was “lucky” in that, I only had 2 wisdom teeth. My sister didn’t have any, one brother had 3 and the other brother had 2.
My first extraction was on an impacted wisdom tooth on the bottom. I went to the dentist—can’t go to the oral surgeon or anything, hell I was only 17, what did I know? I spent a while in the chair waiting for the Novocain to kick in…then the dentist comes in and lays out his instruments. He started by slicing through the gum, no pain, but one of the more disgusting sounds in my opinion. Then he gets his little drill out. Three drill bits later (YIKES!) after burning out the bits or whatever they were and causing smoke everyone and causing blood to fly and chips of tooth or bone to fly, he gets his little wrench out. I swear he about had his knee up on my chest, yanking on this thing. His assistant was holding my head (damn I had a neck ache the next day) and finally all of a sudden the wrench jerks (CRACK!) and bone/tooth chunks go flying. Whew! Finally he’s almost done I think. So he gets in there and is making sure he got it all and finally stitches it up and I go home. Recovery time was about 2 days, took the first two pain pills and skipped the rest. Healed fine.
The second one was just a few years ago after the birth of my youngest child. It had come in while I was pregnant and had no enamel on it. It also had a funky little hook on the root that he was concerned had penetrated the maxillary sinus. He numbed it—that took about 20 minutes, came back in, gave it a tug then plugged my nose and told me to blow (to make sure it hadn’t punctured the sinus). It was out—and my sinus was fine. The extraction portion took about 2 and ½ minutes. VERY simple.
So there’re my stories!
I had mine out when I was 22. The dentist gave me Halcyon to take about 30 minutes before the appointment so I’d be all relaxed when I got there. Guess what? It took effect sometime toward the end of the appointment–about the time they were stitching me up.
In addition to the Halcyon, I got nitrous oxide and novocaine. There wasn’t any pain, but the sounds were horrible. It didn’t help that each time he’d get ready to pull one, the dentist would cheerfully say, “Snap, crackle, pop!” Fortunately, everything went smoothly and quickly. The only weird thing is that I had five wisdom teeth (my mom only had three–guess I got her fourth one), but one of them was really small.
My recovery was short and pretty easy. I didn’t have any bruising or swelling, and I was back at work the following Monday.
My impacted wisdom teeth (they were coming in sideways) were removed under almost surreal circumstances. (The actual physical pain attending the removal was not so bad for me.)
Shall I tell you of the cramped and overbooked oral surgery office? No, that’s far too common and pedestrian.
How about the nature of the impaction, coming in at such an angle as to require two of the teeth being broken in half and taken out with what looked like a fishhook? Nah, that’s probably pretty routine as well.
Shall I tell you instead, then, about the 10 year old boy ahead of me who answered to the name “Armageddon Rodriguez”? That one has stayed with me. If anybody ever says, “Nobody would name their child ‘Armageddon’”, I have a ready rebuttal: Señora Rodriguez, at one time a resident of Flushing, Queens.
Shall I speak of the botching of surgery records, so that they removed the two teeth on the right side of my mouth in my first visit, but then a few weeks later when I came in for “Phase 2”, they began preparing to remove my two bottom wisdom teeth (instead of the two on the left)? I convinced them not to cut open the gums on my bottom right jaw, but they couldn’t remove my upper left wisdom tooth “due to the paperwork”, nor could they take another (superfluous) set of X-Rays under the dental plan to confirm that I indeed only had my two left wisdom teeth left… So I only ever got 3 of my 4 wisdom teeth removed.
Or shall I recount my being operated on (for the second, lower-left-only wisdom tooth extraction) by an intern, with the senior surgeon watching on until he had to step in? After I received my novocaine (“going under” was not an option covered by my insurance for wisdom tooth removal), the junior surgeon cut my gums with a scalpel, and went to town with a pair of what looked like pliers. He tugged so hard my whole head was lifting off the chair with every pull… Then there was a sudden snapping sound, causing the intern to say “awww, shit!” (an exact quote), and I could see a fountain of blood spurting out of my mouth about six inches into the air. (That’s when the senior one took over.)
Not very confidence inspiring!
On the other hand, it didn’t hurt that much after the Novocaine wore off: mostly just a kind of soreness, nothing really painful. I got stitches and some gauze to bite on for the next few hours to absorb the blood, and had milkshakes for dinner that night, but both times, the next day I was eating bagels and cream cheese for breakfast and hot dogs or pizza for lunch without thinking much about it. I never even went to the pharmacy to get the codeine they prescribed.
I had all four out at one time. The dentist missed a small bleeder in one of them while he was finishing up. I got home, promptly went to bed to sleep off the drugs and was awakened by a loud scream. My wife had gone shopping and while I was asleep, I had bled all over the pillow. I looked like I had died a violent death.
We called the dentist back and went back down there. He figured out what had happened and got all set up. The first thing he did was stick a needle full of Novocaine directly into the socket. It took about 5 seconds for that stuff to kick in, and to this day I think it actually took about 5 hours. That hurt!!!
Anyway, he fixed the problem and I’ve not had any issues since.