No Longer Attached

For perspective, this is the spirit in which I'm writing this blog post.*

I had a tooth pulled yesterday. I can tell you in all honesty that it was my worst nightmare come true. Well, one of them. Had the surgery taken place on a crashing plane, that would have pretty much covered the gamut.

If you told me that you were having a tooth pulled, I wouldn't think anything of it. I would suggest a couple of days of oatmeal and codeine, and I would look for a hilarious card to send you to brighten your day.

When I was told that pulling a tooth was my best option, I cried for three hours. Like ugly cried. Like mascara lines down my face and some drool mixed in and slurring my words like a drunk person, cried. I cried in the dentist's office. I called G and bawled on my way to the pharmacy. I skulked around the King Soopers pharmacy like a deranged person, head down, sobbing into my jacket until they called my name. 

Everyone in my entire genetic background all the way back to Adam and Eve has horrific dental problems. So, in a sense, there was no escaping this. But boy did I try. Man I gave it my best shot. I would not say that I am obsessed with my teeth, but I would concede that I care a whole lot about keeping them and making sure they sort of look nice. I have had a lot of problems with them, and have spent more money on them than the rest of my entire body combined (if you don't count covering the grey - that is becoming economic priority #1 now), getting spacers, braces, wisdom teeth removed, retainers, permanent retainers, mouth guards, cleanings, special gum cleanings, root canals, crowns...Just about everything one can do to teeth, I have done. No reservations.

But it turns out there really are no guarantees. And it turns out that you can have very solid plans about how you want things to go, and in the end, you don't actually get a vote.

As a Christian, this should come as no surprise to me. This thing that I have decided to attach enormous value to, matters very little in the end. Turns out I don't need it. Turns out I'll be healthier and happier without it. Who knew?

All I'm sayin is thank God it was a molar. One of those way in the back. Or I would be singin' a different tune right now.

If you're queasy, skip this paragraph:
Long story short I was in a lot of pain and that's because an infection had formed at the root of one of my molars. The thing is, it formed in the root of a tooth that was already dead (root canal, years ago) and the infection was spreading to the bone and the sinus cavity. The dentist said she would refer me to a specialist who could try to save the tooth, but that now this area - for whatever reason - is prone to infections, and the only way to permanently cure it would be to remove the tooth, remove the infection, and eventually - like in 8 or 9 months!!!! - replace the tooth.

Long story short, when she removed the tooth yesterday, the infection had spread to the bone and they had to remove part of it, too. And then scrape part of the remaining bone.

Ok, no more gory deets:
Suffice it to say that, despite being numbed from shots and being extremely high on laughing gas, there was a moment during the surgery in which I was either on Jesus' lap or he was on mine. The details are fuzzy, but I screamed, hit someone, knocked my mask off, and I remember the doctor saying, "Yes, B---------, I know. I know."

It's not even 24 hours later and I feel about 1,200,456 times better than I have in a week. I thought that I would spend this weekend drugged out of my mind, swollen, and sort of psychically floating above it all, and then I would mourn my tooth next week, and then I would spend the rest of my life trying not to identify with some meth head from a West Virginia trailer park.

But no pain meds necessary! Don't get me wrong: antibiotics and ibuprofen are my absolute best friends right now and I love them more than anything else, G and Lucy included. But! The pain is gone! And now that it's gone, I can tell how much pain I've really been in, which was remarkable.

Lord help me if I ever have to pull any more teeth. But Lord forgive me for putting so much of my identity into a few small pieces of enamel.

Are champagne smoothies a thing??



*This is a first world problem. No one is battling a terminal illness or losing a child or living in a war zone. And yet in one little sense, the worst has happened.