They pulled it.
I ended up going to the dentist this morning with horrifying visions of Japanese dental care after the strange experiences I’ve had here with medicine.
He took a quick inspection of my wisdom tooth and then told me (using a cute dental terminology English and Japanese picturebook) that the bastard would have to come out immediately. I asked him how long it would take - about five minutes.
Damn, that be quick! So I went for it, and holy God almighty did it hurt. He used some mild local anesthetic on me, but it didn’t help as much as I had hoped. I have never felt pain like this in my life, and the grinding, breaking stress noises of the tooth as he pried it out almost made me vomit.
Now the cool part - endorphins. This was the first time in my life I’ve experienced this so-called endorphin rush due to pain, and let me tell you - damn. I was higher than a kite for like an hour. It was incredible - I had to go sit down for a while, collect myself, and just kinda sink into the buzz.
It’s about 8 hours later now, and I’m still bleeding a little bit from the yanked tooth. All in all though, it seems pretty good. No pain at all - totally the opposite of what I expected.
One nice touch though was the dentist putting a towel over my eyes, preventing me from being goddamned blinded by his high powered lamp. Every dental clinic should do this. Plus, it allows me to mask my pain.
Only cost about $120. Not bad at all (including wraparound X-Rays).
Ron said,
November 29, 2003 @ 11:54 am
Fun stuff, eh? I had them put me out (I was having all four done at once), but I recall coming back to consciousness about halfway through. The nurse or assistant or whatever she was said, “Doctor, he’s coming out of it!!” “Quick! Put him out again!” says doctor Wong, the small-ish dental surgeon I went to. I mostly just heard what was going on, but the one image I remember vividly was of him with his knee on the chair, reefing with all his might and only the vaguest sensation of a tugging in my mouth as my vision quickly clouded over again.
For me it was not so much the ‘during’ but the ‘after’ that sucked. I couldn’t eat for about a week.
Tech Knight said,
November 29, 2003 @ 12:53 pm
Ooh, bitten by the endorphins bug.. Can your first suspension be far behind? ;)
derek said,
November 29, 2003 @ 3:59 pm
All I remember about my wisdom being pulled is my first (and not even close to last) experience with codeine.
They filled me tylenol 3’s and gave me this enormous prescription. It was great.
Matt said,
November 29, 2003 @ 11:53 pm
Dude, i know how you feel. I went to the dentist once and he missed the frezzing.. i knew this when he drilled my tooth and my back arched up out to of the chair and i broke into a hot sweat. He just looked and me and said “Oh.. I will be done soon.”
Jeff said,
December 7, 2003 @ 4:09 pm
I once went through 99% of a 2 day root canal before the dentist started packing up his tools. He then told me he couldn’t save the tooth and it would have to be pulled.
The next day I went to my regular dentist to have the tooth yanked out. It took 5 seconds and was so easy to remove it scared me.
John said,
June 16, 2006 @ 4:35 am
Please don`t blame the dentist for the lack of success in the effect of local anaesthetic in the lower jaw. Due to the anatomy of the area there is only a 70% success rate.
You can increase the likelihood of success by not waiting until you have rip roaring toothache before seeking treatment and by not being overweight - a mass of fat surrounding the nerve to be anaesthetised with local will prevent penetration of the liquid to the nerve to be blocked.
I am a dentist!