I'd rather have a tooth pulled...

Ok, so I had a tooth pulled today. This entry is not for the easily disgusted. Here goes.

The actual procedure turns out to be pretty painless with modern local anesthetics. The victim in this case was a late coming wisdom tooth that was actually pointing at about a fifteen angle away from down towards the back of my mouth. Useless for chewing, but great for collecting food in a nearly impossible to floss location, and with no matching lower tooth to boot. So that sucker had to go. But the pulling, it turns out, is the easy part.

There's a little condition called "dry socket" that occurs in about 5% of cases. Basically what is supposed to happen is that a blood clot forms in the gap left by the pulled tooth that covers everything until the gum and bone have a chance to heal. When dry socket occurs, the clot is dislodged or washed away, leaving the bone exposed to air--by all accounts a pretty painful and nasty thing to have happen. Minimizing the chance of dry socket is at the top of the post-op to do list. So that means no carbonated beverages, alcohol, or rinsing my mouth for the first 24 hours.

No rinsing. No brushing, no flossing, no tongue touching.

Like most people I never thought about how often I rinse out my mouth until it was taken away from me (the caffeine through carbonation I had realized how much I used--let's just say I was "mildly" irritable today.) Ease of access to potable water has spoiled me at every turn I suppose, but I now realize that I tend to rinse fairly often through the day. Just not today.

So now my mouth feels icky. Part of that is the blood that is supposed to seep from the socket for the first 12 hours or so. But mix that seeping blood with the usual saliva and then add NO RINSING OF THE MOUTH to the mix (and of course I'm not allowed to get the tongue in there to that cleaning that the tongue loves to do) and I feel like I've been drinking from a pool of scum collecting below a garbage can. For eight hours.

Happy Thanksgiving!