So the op was really really COOL. The dentist used instruments that till now I only thought existed in movies. They had this numbing jelly that was strawberry flavored (I wonder if those come in packs of 4 exciting flavors). They had this lip retracting thing that pulled back my upper lip and they injected so much aneasthetic I couldn't even drink water without having some of it dribble out of my mouth. And he used not one, but TWO drills. DRILLS. I could hear him boring his way through my tooth, and I could hear every crack each time he split the tooth and removed a fragment of it. And the part where he stitched up my gums was pretty nifty too. Kinda like sewing come to think of it. Wait, I meant that the stitching was nifty. I do not find sewing to be in any way appealing.

Anyway. The dentist was nice enough to give me back my tooth and I actually have pictures of it already. It's supposedly a pretty big one, about 1.5 times bigger than my molars. In the interests of not causing everyone's dinners to make a return trip, I'll put up a less gruesome pic of my tooth:

What do you think? It couldn't be taken out whole - they actually had to break it into bits , and if you turn the largest fragment over, you can actually see the path the drill bit took as it bored through the tooth. And to think that only 20% of this tooth was visible - everything else was below my gumline. Kinda like an iceberg I guess.

This calls for a polaroid shot! I'll try and scan it in with all my other polaroids tommorrow.

Oh, and the aneasthetic wore off a few hours ago. I popped in the painkillers already and I haven't really felt any pain so far. Though the fun supposedly only starts tonight. And it's kinda amusing how they gave me 2 kinds of painkillers - one regular one I'm to take every 8 hours, and a special, extra powerful one so potent that I can only take two in 24 hours. They call it the "last resort" pain killer. Ah, the wonders of pharmaceutical science.

Now the final question is how much swelling there will be. Wee Koh had swelling for nearly 6 days. I CAN'T stay at home for 6 days. I've got to start work on Thurs. We'll see. If I get horribly disfigured temporarily, I'll wear a mask, a la the phantom of the opera.

posted by NEB at 6:26 PM

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