Category Archives: Broken!

Tomorrow (Tuesday) I head back to the dentist for more and more and more work. This time, it’s a root canal. That sounds fun, no?

A “root canal” is actually called endodontic therapy. It’s the procedure where the dentist (from my limited understanding) hollows out your tooth with a drill and a brush. He removes the pulp and the nerves and then fills it with stuff (possibly gutta-percha – a plant from Southeast Asia) and then fills it and caps it with a crown.

Not THAT kind of canal!

Root canals have a long history of being THE worst dental procedure you could endure. In recent times, however, I think things have gotten easier. I hope so.

After this, I’ll have two temporary crowns and will have to get them replaced with permanent ones soon enough. After that, I think I’m done with crowns and root canals. Those are the expensive things.

Part of me wants to take a break from going to the dentist after this. Just a month or two. But another part of me wants to just get everything done as quickly as possible. The financial part of me is torn as well. I obviously can’t pay for any of this out of pocket, so it’s all going on a credit card. I’ve got good credit, and so I have a year or so to pay without interest. So you see, speed is essential to not paying interest.

This whole thing has been one big mess. In the end, it’s still cheaper than dental insurance (which is sort of messed up). But even more importantly, if I would have flossed, this wouldn’t have been as much of an issue.

So take it from me. Floss. A lot. Every day. Or at least once a week. And go to the dentist at least once a decade. Probably twice a year.

I spent much of the day in a foggy haze. To quell the pain of the extraction, my dentist gave me a prescription for oxycodone. Like last time, I wasn’t sure that I needed it, but certainly didn’t want to be caught without it if the pain became ridiculous.

Last night, I took one before bed, but was asleep before I could tell if it was working. This morning, before going to work, I took another. Again, I didn’t want to be stuck at work in some ridiculous pain. Well, about an hour after being there, the side effects hit me.

I got dizzy and then started to sweat. A lot. I sat down and it suddenly felt like my body was really pissed off at me. I felt spacey and confused for no real reason. Sarah got me some applesauce and after a few minutes, I was better. But the weird reaction is enough to ward me off the stuff.

The dentist told me that they’ll last about six hours. It’s been twelve hours since I took one and I still feel fine. Maybe getting your teeth pulled only hurts at first. Or maybe I have a high pain tolerance. Maybe the drug is someone still mysteriously working. I’m not sure.

All I know is that I won’t be taking oxycodone again (unless I really super have to). The rest of the day was spent in a bit of a fog. Now, I feel sort of headachy, but not too bad.

I’m enjoying my diet of soft foods. The dentist said that I could eat normally the day after the extraction, but I’m going to hold off. Yesterday, after the appointment, Sarah took me to Bamboo Gardens and I got two orders of mapo tofu. It’s super soft and really delicious. I’ll nom on that and applesauce for a couple more days, and then see what it’s like.

In the meantime, I’m working on a few projects. The next mix (which will be a roadtrip mix!) and a thing with my record collection. I’m sure I’ll talk about both later.

To extract teeth, the dentist has to pump your face full of novocaine. I don’t know why, but this makes me really light headed. He had to take a couple of breaks, while the anesthetics did their thing. And each time that would happen, my head felt heavier and heavier.

He did my lower jaw first and that went quite well. Sure, I felt a bit woozy, but no big deal. And then went for the top. First, two injections were made in the roof of my mouth. This hurt. Kind of a lot. But not nearly as much as what happened next.

The dentist came back at me with the needle, stuck it in my upper jaw and suddenly my cheek felt warm. Then hot. And then it spread. Very quickly it consumed the whole left side of my face. Around my nose and eyes it felt like fire. It felt like someone was searing my face with a hot skillet. I panicked and pulled his arm away.

“Are you okay?”

“No! My face.. it’s like it’s on fire!”

“But it doesn’t hurt, right?”

“…. It’s on fire!”

I was freaked out. But as weirdly as it came, it left.

“Was that normal?” I asked him.

“Well.. I must have hit a facial nerve.”

Notice that he never answered my question. We had a good chuckle over it. I mean, why not? My face wasn’t actually on fire. It just felt like it was. All the fun without the need for reconstructive plastic surgery! “Wow, this is really intense,” I said. Probably several times.

A few injections later we took a break. During the break, he wanted me to open my mouth so he could check something. But I couldn’t. My god, I couldn’t open my mouth. By this time, the novocaine was really kicking in.

“Okay,” he said, “let’s take a break and let your body adjust to the epi.” I have no idea what that means. “Just try to do some jaw exercises. I’ll be back.

During the intermission, I tried and tried to open my jaw. It would open about an inch or something. I didn’t really care. Wow… the novocaine really was something, huh. So I decided to try to open it with my hands. That should work or whatever. I mean, why should I even really care about this. I mean, the novocaine was, man. The novocaine is. What the hell is an epi?

So I went to move my arms – you know, those two incredibly tired things attached to my torso. I had arms a bit ago. I remember them. They did stuff like, you know, arm stuff. But they didn’t want to move because they were so very tired. They just wanted to rest. Just a little bit. Like five seconds, okay? We’ll try again in five seconds.

My right arm lifted up. I was doing that. And then the left one. I think it did it on its own because I was way into moving my right arm. The fingers ripped my mouth, pulling and prying and it moved to a point, but then wouldn’t open farther. It was tired too. My mouth just needed a break. Let’s all just chill out for a minute, okay?

It wasn’t just my arms that were tired. It was my shoulders and those muscles that connected my shoulders to my chest. They left for a bit. They were on their own break. But it was time to try this again. Let’s roll.

This time, my hands opened my mouth and, like before, it stopped at a point. But hey, what if I moved my jaw a bit to the right? Would it open? Like now there’s a super secret sneaky way that I have to open my mouth. Like a snake, I can unhinge my jaw. It’s amazing. Look at me. I am unhinging my jaw using two arms that aren’t even mine anymore.

And so I unhinged my jaw by jogging it a bit to the right. It was like a speed bump. The dentist came back in.

“So, are you okay now?”

“It’s like a speed bump. My mouth. I … I got it. It was like a speed bump.” And then I magically could open it without the help of the arm things. I just had to turn it. The right jaw muscles were working, but the left ones went to check out those muscles above my chest. Speed bump. I got it.

So then came the extraction. With the dentist taking over, my arms, my mouth, those upper chest muscles, and the speed bump could all just relax. It was alright.

The bottom one first. It was not an easy pull. “I have to find the fulcrum point.” He couldn’t get leverage and had to move me around, put me in a headlock and stretch out my cheek and jaw and I just knew that I would feel it tomorrow.

There was a crack and I remember that he told me to close my eyes because I shouldn’t get any visual suggestions about what he was doing. This sounded like a good idea. After a lot of pulling and I could sense some worry, but I wasn’t sure if it was his or mine, the tooth came out.

The upper one was done before I even knew he was doing it.

And that was it. The trauma, perhaps the adrenaline, excised the effects of the novocaine from my mind and I was mostly coherent and stuff. We talked for a bit and then I was on my way.

Now I’m at home and I have to change these nasty gauze things every thirty minutes. I can’t eat real food for a day, but I’m going to wait long than that. I fear the dreaded dry socket.

This whole thing seems so needlessly drawn out.

It’s been over a month since the doctor has released me to go back to regular duty (I was on “light duty” due to my finger being crushed and the joint destroyed). A position opened up and it was offered to me, but I had to get off light duty to do it. I was fine with that since it was a desk job with even less lifting than I was doing on “light duty,” so I asked the doctor to release me.

He checked me out and agreed and I was released.

So I took the paper into work, gave it to human resources. I told the manager who offered the job to me that I was ready to start, but he told me that someone else had to be offered the job because I wasn’t released. Of course, I told him that I was, but he said that there’s more to being released than the doctor – the insurance company paying the bills has to release me. That may take some time.

Now, it doesn’t make much sense why the insurance company would be dragging its feet. You’d think that the sooner I’d be released, the sooner they’d be able to stop paying for me.

A month went by and I was told that “it takes time” and “it’s up to the insurance company.” Getting a bit fed up, I called the insurance company and asked them what was the big freakin deal. They said that, yes, I was released and should be able to go back to full duty as of a month ago. I asked them why I wasn’t and they didn’t really have an answer.

I related this to human resources and they said that the insurance company still needs to fax some paperwork to them.

Someone is dropping the ball here and it’s not me. I don’t think it’s human resources, really, because they want me to be out of the light duty job so that another worker (who actually needs it) can take it. But they can’t move me out of it until I’m fully released.

So it appears that the party with the least amount to gain from me being on light duty is to blame. Odd that the party with the most to gain was fine with releasing me right away.

I’ve got two more doctors appointments. One is a final medical check up and the other is some assessment that they do for the Dept of Labor & Industry. They rate my permanent damage and award me some BS “settlement.”

There was some interesting insurance company stuff going on here (as there was prior to the surgery), but I’ll save them for a later date – after everything is completed.

As for the permanent damage stuff, my finger has more movement in it than the doctors thought it would have, but it’s far from being back to normal. They say that it might get better over the next year or so. It also healed at a strange angle. When I make a fist, this fifth finger angles off to the side. Fun, no? No. Not really.

But everyone seems very surprised that I healed as well as I did. Even the insurance company was saying how severe of an injury it was.

That’s it. More about all of this when I know more about all of this.

Though I mostly just sit there, bored out of my skull, doing absolutely nothing at work (that’s my job – I answer a telephone that often doesn’t ring), last night I had to complete some orientation training.

This training was about something called Freight Flow.

What is this “Freight Flow” you ask? Well, it is many things, according to the training documentation. Mostly it’s just a flowing system to get freight into stock and then sold to the customer. It’s a pretty common sense, simple thing. All stores do it.

But here the benefit of “Freight Flow” is described as providing “store management with the necessary tools to manage the flow of freight.”

So the benefit of Freight Flow is that it allows managers to manage the flow of freight. That’s practically a palindrome, and most importantly: it doesn’t mean anything. Most of the documentation reads like this.

Most of it doesn’t say anything at all. It covers some basic, useful points and then litters the rest of the many, many pages with sentences like that one.

In another bit of literature that I was reading last night, the same exact sentence appeared in three consecutive paragraphs. Did the writer do this on a dare? Was the proofreader high on crack? Or is this just how it goes?