Toothy McToothface
Jun. 7th, 2014 09:16 pmThe year Aunt Tudi died, I essentially stopped eating much of anything and, nine times out of ten, what I did eat would come right back up. One of the unfortunate side-effects of having gastric bypass surgery is your teeth falling victim to a combination of frequent vomiting and vitamin/mineral deficiencies.
The last half of 2011 saw the beginning of my teeth's hasty demise. It didn't help that I inherited my father's soft enamel. By the time I moved out to San Diego, I had small cavities in pretty much every tooth. Even though I began eating a little more and keeping most of it down, the damage was already done, and the decay took my mouth as its permanent bitch.
I ended up having to go to the dentist in the hope of at least saving two of my front teeth; however, the extent of my dental issues dictated that I had one of two choices. The first choice was to get a deep cleaning, and root canal on every tooth, followed by caps. The cost was well over $40,000. The other, much cheaper, choice was dentures. I'm getting help to get this done, first by The Mother Unit, then by a friend.
After making the decision to go with dentures, I came home and, just a few days later, had a piece of one of my front teeth come out, and the tooth next to it, also a front one, bend outward. This happened over Memorial Day Weekend. It was unpleasant, to say the least, but the dentist was able to work me in on Tuesday, when the office opened again. Before I could even get there, though, the Steve Buscemi tooth broke off the rest of the way, right at the gumline.
They were able to get it out without having to remove the other tooth as well, and they moved my full extraction up by a week, to today.
At 10:00 AM, I showed up, and gave the staff problems with my funky, small, rolling veins, but was eventually knocked flat out only to wake up 45 minutes later with temporary dentures and an assload of bloody gauze shoved in my face. The oral surgeon explained that the dentures wouldn't fit very well, and would probably cause me all manner of pain because of that, and because I had a mouth full of bloody holes in my head.
He was right. Even though I was dealing with three toothaches already, those phantom aches, combined with the very real bloody hole aches and the painful damned temporary dentures has me feeling sorry for myself. But I own it. I admit it. I'm a big wiener when it comes to pain. I fret. I mope. I whine.
But I'm also grateful, because I know this is the worst of it. Well, tomorrow will probably be worse, because the second day of any kind of surgery recovery has always been that way, or that's been my experience. By Monday, I should be feeling a bit better, and might be able to actually eat and drink. As it stands right now, I'm like Ted Striker and his drinking problem in the movie Airplane. My first attempt at trying to get some water in me, after not having any since around 10 PM last night, resulted in most of it going down my front. Then I started drooling blood. Since I got home around 12 PM, I've just been lying on my back to keep from drooling all over everything.
I'm eating really runny instant potatoes like a baby bird, just sticking the spoon (all three spoons of mash I could muster) as far back in my mouth as possible and letting it slide down my throat. I have a squirt bottle of water with which I'm doing the same.
There were a couple of other things I was going to write about, and had written about, but my application unexpectedly quit on me. When I got it back, this is all I had left of my post. So, I'll just post about the other stuff tomorrow. And I'll be sure to write everything out in Word before transferring it to Xjournal. DAMN, I miss Semagic!
The last half of 2011 saw the beginning of my teeth's hasty demise. It didn't help that I inherited my father's soft enamel. By the time I moved out to San Diego, I had small cavities in pretty much every tooth. Even though I began eating a little more and keeping most of it down, the damage was already done, and the decay took my mouth as its permanent bitch.
I ended up having to go to the dentist in the hope of at least saving two of my front teeth; however, the extent of my dental issues dictated that I had one of two choices. The first choice was to get a deep cleaning, and root canal on every tooth, followed by caps. The cost was well over $40,000. The other, much cheaper, choice was dentures. I'm getting help to get this done, first by The Mother Unit, then by a friend.
After making the decision to go with dentures, I came home and, just a few days later, had a piece of one of my front teeth come out, and the tooth next to it, also a front one, bend outward. This happened over Memorial Day Weekend. It was unpleasant, to say the least, but the dentist was able to work me in on Tuesday, when the office opened again. Before I could even get there, though, the Steve Buscemi tooth broke off the rest of the way, right at the gumline.
They were able to get it out without having to remove the other tooth as well, and they moved my full extraction up by a week, to today.
At 10:00 AM, I showed up, and gave the staff problems with my funky, small, rolling veins, but was eventually knocked flat out only to wake up 45 minutes later with temporary dentures and an assload of bloody gauze shoved in my face. The oral surgeon explained that the dentures wouldn't fit very well, and would probably cause me all manner of pain because of that, and because I had a mouth full of bloody holes in my head.
He was right. Even though I was dealing with three toothaches already, those phantom aches, combined with the very real bloody hole aches and the painful damned temporary dentures has me feeling sorry for myself. But I own it. I admit it. I'm a big wiener when it comes to pain. I fret. I mope. I whine.
But I'm also grateful, because I know this is the worst of it. Well, tomorrow will probably be worse, because the second day of any kind of surgery recovery has always been that way, or that's been my experience. By Monday, I should be feeling a bit better, and might be able to actually eat and drink. As it stands right now, I'm like Ted Striker and his drinking problem in the movie Airplane. My first attempt at trying to get some water in me, after not having any since around 10 PM last night, resulted in most of it going down my front. Then I started drooling blood. Since I got home around 12 PM, I've just been lying on my back to keep from drooling all over everything.
I'm eating really runny instant potatoes like a baby bird, just sticking the spoon (all three spoons of mash I could muster) as far back in my mouth as possible and letting it slide down my throat. I have a squirt bottle of water with which I'm doing the same.
There were a couple of other things I was going to write about, and had written about, but my application unexpectedly quit on me. When I got it back, this is all I had left of my post. So, I'll just post about the other stuff tomorrow. And I'll be sure to write everything out in Word before transferring it to Xjournal. DAMN, I miss Semagic!
