I was reminiscing with my mom tonight about vanilla. See, years ago when my son was born I was gritting my teeth during labor and broke a wisdom tooth in half, it probably had a cavity already that I didn’t know about not having dental insurance at the time and all. I was rather busy making a person so I just spit out the tooth fragment and forgot about it.
A week or so later, holy killmenow tooth pain. I’m talking searing, blinding, I’d gladly anesthetize myself with a club pain. The nerve was exposed in the broken wisdom tooth, and of course it was a Friday night so I had to wait until Monday morning to get into a dentist. No insurance meant coming up with the cash, I sure couldn’t handle special premium weekend rates on top of whatever the extraction was going to cost.
So I’m in nauseatingly horrific pain, and breastfeeding a newborn so I’m not allowed anything stronger than a regular strength tylenol every few hours. Needless to say, that wasn’t nearly enough pain-killer. After a miserable sleepless night, I get the bright idea to call my grandmother the next morning. After all, she grew up in the hills, never saw a doctor or dentist until she came to MI in her thirties, she was a font of useful home remedies.
She recommended soaking a cotton ball in vanilla extract and jamming it up onto the tooth. I tried that, tasted awful and didn’t relieve the pain. Called Grandma back and she asked if I was using real vanilla, I checked and of course I had imitation because it was so much cheaper than the good stuff. Gram said it was the alcohol in the extract that worked on the nerve and recommended getting any booze and letting it saturate the nerve into numbness. She’d tried to tell me liquor to begin with and I squawked about drunken nursing and brain damage, so she rightly figured I wouldn’t yet know real vanilla extract was hi-proof. Grams was slick like that.
The only thing we had in the house was Amaretto for some reason, it did help (even though I kept spitting instead of swallowing the excess in my paranoia about making the baby drunk.) I went thru like half that fifth surviving until that Monday morning, the extraction itself was painless by comparison. Can’t stand the taste of Amaretto since then.
I’ll never forget being in horrible pain, tears running down my face as I read the label on the stupid vanilla extract bottle and thinking “If only I could afford real vanilla, everything would have been alright!”
Sure, what I should have been thinking was “If only my husband had a job with dental benefits, or made enough money that we could afford an emergency appointment, or my job had better benefits, or I didn’t have too much pride to ask my parents for the cash…” or something that made more sense, but in my post-natal hormonal craziness, sleep-deprived from dealing with a newborn and hurtin like a sonuvabitch, I was crying that I couldn’t afford real vanilla.
I haven’t had to buy imitation for years, even though it’s probably just fine for most baking needs, and I’m really really thankful I can afford actual vanilla now.
While I do exercise and attempt to eat right, that doesn’t mean I couldn’t be suffering from untold conditions. Furthermore, while my doubts of depression have been painful, now that the abyss has receded I find meaning in the senselessness. For my health, thanks!
).