About as much fun as getting teeth pulled

6 years ago, almost to the day, in fact, it was the 22nd sept, I remember clearly, but I’ll tell you about that another time. 6 years ago I discovered I was pregnant with my first child, Dudette. This isn’t going to be a post about my pregnancy or how much I love Dudette, or how I had resigned myself to not having kids. It’s just the spring board to where we are now. Sometimes I have to do that, start at the beginning to make the present make sense. And so, I was pregnant with my first child, and I suffered from Hyperemesis Gravidarum, a rare, severe and debilitating illness which made me vimit for the whole pregnancy, lose a LOT of weight, and have hospital stays, meds for the whole time. Now if you’ve ever had a nasty tummy bug, and try to brush your teeth, chances are that it either made you puke, or gag, or you managed it, but then puked afterwards 5 million times. Science lesson stuff here – It’s not good for your teeth. You brush, then puke and it naffs your enamel. Ok so THAT bit wasn’t exactly science, but it’s correct none the less. Now imagine doing that for 3 YEARS in a row. Yes, that’s right, I had 3 kids in 2.5 years, making me pregnant and sick for at least 3 yrs  in a row, with only a few weeks in between where instead of puking I was recouperating from births. Fast forward 4 yrs and I am on a liquid diet and in agony every day.

You see for most people, it’s easy to say Why didn’t you go to the dentist then Dumbass? Actually, for many reasons. Having HG left me with many issues, and some from before I was sick, but those ones don’t matter here. After spending so long gagging from LOOKING at something, never mind actually physically PUTTING things in my mouth, I got an aversion, no that’s not even the word… A deathly FEAR of anyone touching my mouth. I’m not talking about me politely shooing people away from my mouth, I’m talking about threatening them with a baseball bat and a very slow painful death for just LOOKING at my mouth, and by God if you touch it, you’d better have good insurance and someone up there looking out for you. It’s about irrational as, say, a fear of spiders, or snakes or Barney. Don’t look at me like that. Barney is a scary ass dinosaur. Not scary BECAUSE he’s a dinosoar, but scary in a creepy, fucked up way. I mean it’s a purple dinosaur that dances round kids… Seriously there is something wrong with that!

I digress. So yes, my irrational fear of anyone touching my teeth, and the finance issue secured a permanent vacation AWAY from the dentist. Until a few months ago. Sometimes you have to admit defeat, and as hard as I had been fighting it, it was fast becoming a losing battle. On one side of my mouth I could eat crunchy food, but it couldn’t be hot, the other side I could eat hot stuff but it had to be soft.. I couldn’t eat nuts, and my widom teeth were trying to kill me. Seriously, they had pickaxes and hammers and they were beating my face to death. They were. Shut up. You don’t know. You weren’t there.

Anyway, the only thing I could do to dispose of the evil, murderous wisdom teeth was to finally go visit the antichrist  emergency dentist. Why oh why did I do that? Oh yes because I was dying. That woman was a bitch. Well I think she was a bitch. It’s hard to tell because her English was as broken as my teeth. But even though I told her I was dying, and that she’d be best off putting me under and removing every single tooth and fitting me for falsies, she looked at me like I had gone crazy. Maybe she didn’t understand what I was saying. It’s a possibility. Then she laughed. How is this funny? Ok… shut up lady, you don’t know who you’re messing with. She sent me home with a script for a special toothpaste. What the fuck? For a few seconds I thought that MAYBE, just maybe, the toothpaste had some ‘special formula’ and I’d be pleasantly surprised and be taken to a far away land. Maybe it has. I never got to find out. I handed the script in, and they told me they didn’t have any in, and I’d have to come back tomorrow. Then the next day, then the next week… Then they told me they can’t find any suppliers that carry it. Advice was to go back to my dentist and get a new script for something different. So no happy paste.

I finally registered with a dentist and was forced against my will to go for my “Assessment appointment”  in which the dentist looks in my mouth, tells me what needs doing and then arranges appointments to get started. Ok. Me big, me brave, me running down the hills screaming the other way.

To my surprise the new patient registration forms now have a tiny question at the bottom. So tiny, but it got me so excited.  Do you have a fear of dentists? Hell yeah I do mother fucker. And so I placed a tick in the box next to it. Then sat down to await a fate worse than death. Waiting for the Dentist of childhood past to come out and drag me by the hair kicking and screaming into the room. He would look like a big bear and look dishevelled and have a twinkle in his eye that says “This won’t hurt a bit” Yeah, Ok dude. And I would scream and yet no words would come out. And he would be….  ”Mrs I?”… “Mrs I please?” Oh. Thats me… and you’re…. A woman. And you’re younger than me. And you don’t have that glint. Hmmm. Maybe she’s luring me into a false sense of security. When she gets me in the room she’s going to attack me with the drill without pain meds and kill me, very slowly. But no. She sits me down on a very comfy chair and goes through my form. Asks about ym fear of dentists and I tell her that I might have to kill her if she touches my mouth, but not to take it personally and I’d kill my own kids for touching it too. She laughs sympathetically and tells me that it’s not going to work if she can’t touch my mouth, but that she will be careful and she will stop at any time if I feel uncomfortable or sick or if I feel the need to strangle her. How considerate. And so she starts her examination. she waffles on to the assistant about upper left this and lower right that and a bunch of terminology that I’m sure she made up because it sounded like gobble-de-gook. She said I would probably need to have 3 teeth out. Joy. Why not just get a fucking shot gun and shoot me NOW. but that would be ages away, I can freak over my impending death later… For now the receptionist has just come into the room and told dentist lady that her next appointment has just cancelled. Oh good, she can have a cup of tea for 5 mins, she earned it having me there. So I stand up “OK, so nice to meet you, I’ll be in….” “Oh Mrs I, are you in a hurry? I thought we may as well get started now as I don’t have anyone for another 40 minutes”. ARE YOU SHITTIN’ ME???? Ummm well… I kinda wanted to write my will be forehand, but well fuck it, I HAVE nothing to leave anyone except my recipe collection and my camera.. MY CAMERA!! Hell no is anyone getting my baby. I will survive this, and me and my D5000 will live happily ever after. And so Miss D made a start on my treatment, which consisted of her stabbing me to death, or giving me a shot of local anesthetic, whatever. And she talked me through it, though I have to say I think I was probably too busy ripping my own nails off to truly hear what she was saying. But I did survive. Miss D, despite having an evil job, was quite nice. For a butcher.

And so, we had many appointments which all trotted along quite nicely (as nicely as torture CAN go anyway). Until i got the call to say I could have the surgery. By this time I was feeling quite sure of myself, and began to look forward to it. Partly because my wisdom teeth were hurting so bad that I was literally climbing the walls and living on co-codamol and drinking any drink that wasn’t room temperature through a straw. Partly because my wisdom tooth (Lower right 8 – courtesy of Miss D) was on it’s side, half out of the gum and half under and drilling a fucking hole in the tooth next to it. Partly because I knew that once it was done, I would feel better and be able to eat and drink again. but mostly because they said they would put me to sleep and I’d go in, have a nap and then wake up and it would be done. I wouldn’t know anything about it. A nap in the middle of the day!! When you have 3 kids, you’d bite off your own arm for a nap in the day. Well you would IF you could bite. So yeah.

Everything went pretty well, when I say that, I mean I DID wake up afterwards. As sorry as I am about that for YOU, it’s true. I can’t come haunt your sorry asses and move your car keys when you need them most, or poke you about when you’re on your own at night. Some people spoil all my fun. To say I felt “woogy” (it’s a word – Might be MY word, but it’s a real word none the less) was an understatement. And I wasn’t fully aware of the effects that the general anesthetic would have on my afterwards. Did you know you can actually put on 4lb in 3 days just by being bunged? Let me tell you, that is ALWAYS fun. Not to mention that I also had the sore gum thing going on, and lived for Codeine O’clock. yes Codeine is my best friend. I’m so glad that it’s OTC here. I’m not so glad that I got an infection on top of things that made my face explode. I’m working on that. And just to add insult to injury… Aunt flo is visiting. Craptastic timing BITCH.