252 Days Later

On October 26th, 2009, I got my two right-hand wisdom teeth removed.

My first wisdom tooth extraction was back in the olden days. I was still living in Port Orchard, which puts it sometime between 1992 and 1996. I was getting a crown on the tooth right in front of my top left wisdom tooth. It was a fully erupted wisdom tooth. They yanked it while I was numbed up from the crown work. No big deal. Didn’t feel a thing. However, I reacted as though they were trying to kill me. In the few seconds that they were pulling on it, I apparently tried to escape up over the back of the chair. I swear, I heard it pulling out. There was popping and squealing. It did not make me happy. It didn’t need stitches, I didn’t need painkillers, and it didn’t have any complications. Still, it freaked me out a little. The idea of having a tooth casually pulled with your consent is a little disturbing.

The second extraction went nowhere near as smoothly. The lower left wisdom tooth was impacted; the root was fused to the bone and curved backward. They gave me tranquilizers to take before the extraction. They told me that on that dose, most men just sleep though it. No such luck for me. I metabolize medications pretty quickly, and the tranquilizer wore off before they even started. It took them an hour to get the tooth out. There was crunching and drilling and pulling. I had tears running down into my ears. The doctor’s hands hurt by the time it was over. I had to throw away the shirt I wore because I couldn’t get the blood stains out of the neckline. Two days later I was fine, but I decided that I was never going to be conscious for another wisdom tooth removal.

I put off the final two wisdom teeth extractions for nearly 5 years. I was a bit traumatized.

Did you know that if you have impacted wisdom teeth, sinus pressure can make your gums bleed? Yes indeed.

Did you know that if you have one cusp of a wisdom tooth showing through your gums, you can get infections down in there? Yes indeed again.

So in October, I started having problems with my head. New problems. You know, because I didn’t already have enough problems in my head. I had a horrible pain in the back of my jaw. The top right wisdom tooth was so far impacted I couldn’t feel it with my tongue. It was essentially in my sinuses. The bottom one was infected. I went to the dentist, picked up a prescription for antibiotics, and scheduled the surgery.

Two weeks later, I went in for the extractions. They won’t let you drive after you’ve come out of general anesthetic, so I had to recruit a friend to skip out of work and drive me to and from the clinic. I hate asking people to do things for me, so that was nearly enough to make me put off the whole thing, but I knew I had to get it done. Repeat infections like that can cause bone loss. I didn’t really want to risk that.

I love general anesthetic. It is like magic. I don’t respond badly to it like some people. I go in, I chat with people doing stuff around me, and then I suddenly wake up and it is time to go. I don’t get queasy, and it took me maybe a minute to stop being wobbly on my feet. My friend drove me home. We sat around for a while, chatting while I changed the bloody gauze pads every few minutes. I felt fine. I didn’t feel any real discomfort, but I could tell that my lip was a little torn up. I’m guessing it got stuck between my teeth and a tool or someone’s hand and got pinched. I was unconcerned.

I had taken a week off to recover, thinking that I’d be fine in a day or two, then I’d have a couple of days to kill before going back to work. It didn’t quite work out that way.

Day one, I was fine. I had plenty of soft food in the house, and plenty of Percocet. Sleepy time, doggy attention, cats in my face.

Day two, I was wondering why I still couldn’t feel that side of my lip or chin. I was warned in advance about how close the bottom tooth was to the nerve that runs down my chin, and decided it was probably related. Maybe the tissue was swollen and putting pressure on the nerve. Whatever.

Day three, I was getting a little worried. I started doing the warm salt water swishing thing they tell you to do when your mouth is torn up and I made a startling discovery. If I closed my mouth and put a little pressure on the salt water, it would come put my nose. The upper wisdom tooth socket went directly into my sinus. I couldn’t create a vacuum in my mouth. It made swallowing interesting, too. It didn’t hurt, and it was kind of amusing, so I figured it would heal. My real concern was the bottom socket. It was starting to hurt, and the Percocet wasn’t working anymore. I wasn’t sure if I was just being a big baby or if there was a real issue. I decided to wait until morning and call the doctor.

Day four, I was in agony. I called and told them that I couldn’t wait another day for a follow-up appointment. Something was wrong. They told me to come in immediately. It turns out I had dry socket. When you have a tooth extracted, a blood clot should form in the socket to protect your nerve and bone, and to guide the growth of new bone and gum tissue. If you have no clot, it is called dry socket. I had exposed nerve and bone in my mouth. There’s only one thing they can do for dry socket. They shoot you full of local painkillers and then pack the socket with clove-oil soaked gauze. Clove oil is apparently one of the only things that will kill nerve pain. It is very effective and tastes wonderful. (No, really. It reminded me of Christmas ham.)

For the next several days, I was in every day or two to have the packing removed and replaced. It kills the pain, but it also keeps the hole from closing up as quickly as it should.

After about a week, the socket developed… a flavor. It didn’t taste like cloves, and it had a texture to it. I went in for the usual replacement packing, and they determined that I had an infection in the bone. They gave me more antibiotics and painkillers and sent me on my way.

At this point, I still couldn’t feel my lower lip or chin, and I was still eating soft food. I couldn’t open my mouth all the way. I couldn’t chew anything. I lost about 15 pounds over the next few weeks.

At the end of three weeks of pain killers and dry socket treatment, my doctor recommended taking another week off of work to get extra sleep and help me heal a little faster. Luckily I had a ton of sick time racked up and a great boss who had no issues with me doing that. After another week off and more changing of the packing, we finally got the socket to where I could do without painkillers and without the packing. I was left with a giant hole in the back of my jaw that I had to rinse out with a syringe after each meal. The hole was still so big four weeks after the extraction that shining a flashlight into my mouth cast shadows of the edge of the socket onto the bottom of the socket. It was a very big tooth, and it left a very big hole.

The socket was finally healing and I was off the painkillers, but I still couldn’t chew solid food. I went to a jaw specialist, who told me that I had a lot of swelling from the wrenching they gave my jaw while I was unconscious. He prescribed Dexamethasone (a steroid to reduce swelling) and a tranquilizer to help me sleep. Two weeks later, I could eat normally again.

It has been 252 days since the extraction. I still have a hole in my gums big enough to stuff a grain of rice. I still can’t entirely feel my right-hand bottom lip or chin. If I touch my chin, I feel it in my lip. If I run a finger across my chin, it tickles horrendously all over the bottom half of my face. If I get something cool on my lip, it feels like something freezing is on my chin. The same thing happens with warm things; I get an over-inflated sense of heat. My nerves are still rewiring, so they exaggerate what they feel, if they feel anything at all. My chin constantly feels like I’m pressing two very cold fingers to it. The lip feels paralyzed, but it isn’t. Sometimes when I’m talking I’ll talk as though it really doesn’t move, and I have to catch myself and try to talk normally. I can’t really feel my upper or lower gums, which makes chewing, brushing, and flossing that side a little weird. I’m told that all of this could have been avoided if I had gotten my wisdom teeth removed when I was in my teens, when my bones and the roots of the teeth were softer, and the healing process would have been faster. Too bad nobody mentioned that to my parents at the time.

My doctor says that there’s a possibility that I’ll eventually get all of the feeling back. It could be years. On the other hand, maybe my brain will just give up trying to get it back together and I won’t notice that I don’t feel it anymore.

Either way, I’m happy that all of my wisdom teeth are finally gone. Hopefully I won’t have to have anything else extracted. I’m pretty sure I don’t want to start this whole process again.