Lacking wisdom

Whilst eating my lunch today I noticed that one of teeth felt a little sharp when I touched it with my tongue. So I did what any normal, non-dentist person would do – I shoved my finger back there to see what I could find. What I found was slightly disturbing – half my tooth was missing! When did this happen? There was no pain, so I don't know if it broke during lunch or weeks ago.

Of course I went straight to worse case scenario and figured that my tooth would need to be taken out without any anaesthetic due to being pregnant. Before anaesthetic you could take a swig of rum to numb the pain, but oh no, no such substances can touch this sacred vessel. A quick internet search (thank you, Google) and a call to my obstetrician's office to confirm, I found out you can have a local anaesthetic, which surprised me because you can't take plain old over the counter ibuprofen.

One phone call later and I had an appointment for 3pm down the road with a dentist I'd never met before. I was a little bit scared but figured since the tooth didn't hurt yet, I'd probably be able to wait a few weeks until Tricky is born and then go back to have the tooth taken out while under the influence of some hard core dental drugs.

I sat in the chair, pretending that I wasn't scared and the dentist, Steven, informed me that yes, my tooth had broken but luckily it was one of my wisdom teeth so it didn't need to be saved, he could just extract it. As lovely as he was I wanted to tell him that no matter how pretty he made it sound with words like 'extract' and 'remove' all I could hear was “I will GOUGE open your gums and YANK out this tooth whilst laughing at your PAIN”. He did make me feel better by telling me it wasn't my fault that the tooth had gone bad, the way it was shaped meant a toothbrush could never reach it. I bet he says that to all the heavily pregnant women though.

So I had a decision to make. Get it 'extracted' right then or leave it and wait for it to start hurting before I came back. I figured I might be really busy in a few weeks, what with an infant an all, so I decided to go ahead with it. The tooth was history.

I was draped in a very glamorous lead apron for a quick x-ray then numbed up and Steven got to work on my dodgy tooth. But that sucker just would not budge - it took 45 minutes of yanking to get it out, luckily all in one piece. By the end of it all I'd been in the chair for just over an hour and even though I wasn't in any pain I'd managed to carve half moon shapes in the palms of my hands with my fingernails, just from the tension of having to sit there. At the end he told they normally schedule a check up appointment for ten days after a wisdom tooth removal to make sure that everything is healing up properly but because my 'delicate condition' meant I couldn't be sure just how available I'd be, they'd call me at the seven day mark just to see what I wanted to do. But then it got even better, because Steven said that if I'd had the baby and was worried about my tooth (or lack there of) he would COME TO ME to check it out. How nice is that?! I have never heard of a dentist making house calls before.

The anaesthetic has worn off now and it's no where near as bad as I thought it would be. I'm left with a dull ache, a massive hole in my gum and my tooth in a little plastic bag. If I leave under my pillow I wonder if I'll get any money?