“X” is for X-Ray

Her blonde hair was tied back in a messy ponytail, and when she opened her mouth behind her mask, she spoke with a heavy Boston accent. “So, do you floss regularly?”

I stared up at the woman with her gloved hands in my mouth. “Well, umm, I floss?”

My dentist laughed. “I don’t know, I’m asking you.”

She finished up with her examination and then went to go grab the x-rays that she had taken of my teeth earlier.

I waited for a few minutes until my dentist came back with another dentist.

“So, that weird thing you felt in your mouth was an extra tooth.” She pointed to my x-rays. “You have five wisdom teeth.

I had no problems with my four wisdom teeth for a while, but sometime this year my mouth tried to do something weird and push out another wisdom tooth.

“Oh.” I looked at the odd photo of the inside of my mouth. “That’s weird.”

“I guess you have extra wisdom,” she chuckled a little. “But you should probably get that surgically removed because it’s sort of pushing the other teeth out of alignment.”

“Oh.”

I ended up scheduling an appointment a few months later with my oral surgeon, and coming in to remove my small anomaly.

After the oral surgeon assistants helped me in the chair and hooked up to a monitor “So, are you ready?”

It would be the first surgical procedure and the first time that I would ever be put to sleep. I was a little nervous. “As ready as I’ll ever be.”

“Okay, I’m going to insert this IV in your arm and then you can start counting back from 100.” They put the IV in with the drug that would knock me out. I started counting, and before they even put the nasal cannula of oxygen on me, I passed out.

After what seemed like a second later passed I was woken up by the surgeon’s assistants and guided into a waiting area.

“You did great. There’s some gauze in your mouth right now to help some of the bleeding, you have your prescription for meds here,” she handed me a bag of ice, “put this on your face, and your sister is here to drive you home.”

“It doesn’t look like she’s in any pain.” My sister said to my mom who was on the other end of the phone. “Yeah, she’s just sitting there chilling.”

I was high out of my mind and I couldn’t feel my face for the rest of the day. I remember attempting to eat a milkshake with a spoon and taking an incredibly disgusting bloodied-faced selfie, but that was about it. I also kept my extra-bloodied wisdom tooth in a packet to take home, so when I happen to stumble upon it, I can think back to the extra wisdom I had creeping into my mouth.

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