i had my wisdom teeth pulled almost two weeks ago friday. three of the extraction sites seem to be healing up fine and normally. the last one is a bitch and hurts like a motherfucker. saturday after the surgery i woke up fine. sunday and monday mornings i woke up in excruciating pain and it hasn’t really stopped since and has only the tiniest bit gotten better. saturday i’d gotten off the vicodin and onto tylenol because i thought the vicodin would make me sleepy for the drive up north on sunday, but the tylenol (with it’s doubled dosage of acetaminophen) made me sleepier than the vicodin did.

i had this foolish notion i would be fine after three days. and the literature the oral surgeon gave me implied i’d be onto solid food by day three. so i was eating sandwiches on day two. soft, little sandwiches, but solid food nonetheless. i think i started chewing too soon. and that bottom right tooth was apparently a bitch to pull out (i can’t remember why though), and it’s not just a little round hole like the others, it’s a long gash and the gum is separated from my teeth by that gash. it has a lot more healing to do.

but the pain. i don’t think i’ve ever had this much pain for this long in my entire life. as an experiment i went off the pain meds and denied myself tylenol or anything else of that ilk since monday (i got really ill after bay to breakers on sunday — combo of not enough sleep or water, strong pain meds, and alcohol) and sometimes it hurts so bad i want to scratch the side of my face off. this afternoon i gave in and had some generic pain medication out of the medicine cabinet at work. i can understand now how animals gnaw away at themselves for a variety of reasons — boredom, panic, pain. my dad’s dog gnawed the skin and flesh off his leg recently (just before they put him to sleep due to old age and illness) because it hurt and he’d lost a lot of sensation in it. poor baby…i completely understand.