Out Of It

Sorry I haven't been posting much these last few days. I have been out of it for a number of reasons, reasons which I will enumerate below if anyone is interested...

Okay, so on Wednesday, I woke up with a stabbing pain in my mouth. I hadn't been in pain Tuesday evening, except for a weird feeling in one of my teeth. Not a pain, really...Just enough of a sensation to be aware that something was probably wrong without feeling any sort of urgency about setting it right.

When I woke up in the morning...well, suddenly, the urgency issue sorted itself out. Yikes. I've been thinking for a few days now about how best to describe the feeling in my front teeth. First, I came up with the idea of "sucking on the metal ball from Phantasm like a Jolly Rancher." That accurately gets to the sharpness of the pain, but not really the force. So, I think, instead, I'll equate the feeling with "being shot in the face repeatedly at close range by a guy with a nail gun."

And it was weird to wake up feeling that kind of intense pain. At first, I thought I must be dreaming. I remember even thinking something like, "Whoa, this hurts...I must be grinding my teeth in real life and dreaming about my teeth falling out." But, no, I was grinding my teeth in the dream and in real life, my teeth were falling out. Which is even worse.

I was supposed to show up for work that day, around 90 minutes after I woke up. Immediately, my first thought was to call in sick, as there was no way I could actually work under such vile conditions. It was only after I had dialed the phone and was waiting for it to ring that I realized I was about to call in sick because of a tooth ache. Which is probably the lamest calling-in-sick excuse in the world.

I mean, I can't come in because my tooth hurts? If I was a boss somewhere (unlikely) and I had an employee working for me (equally unlikely), and they called in and told me they had to miss a day because their tooth hurt, my first instinct would be immediate termination based on a cavalier attitude towards providing reasonable work excuses.

Like the time I asked for a Sunday off at Barnes & Noble and said that I had a doctor's appointment. Oops...And they totally bought it! Can you believe that? A doctor's appointment on Sunday...What a bunch of maroons.

But, anyway, my boss let me off for the day, so all I had to figure out was how to get my tooth to stop pulsating, Ren and Stimpy-style, inside my head. I called my father, who manages and consults at a large dental office in Koreatown.

"Lee, you've got to get me in to the dentist. I'm dying over here..."

"Okay, Lon...You can come in at 4:45."

"4:45! It's 10 am...Isn't there anything sooner?"

[What follows is an actual, verbatim quote, I swear.]

"Well...You can come in here and wait for a while and hope that someone gets to you, but I can't guarantee you time with the dentist until 4:45."

Wow...What a delightful offer. To sit around, in pain, in the waiting room of a dental office in Koreatown, watching Everest on DVD with the sound turned off and writing month-old issues of Los Angeles magazine! That's sure to sooth what ails my canines and incisors!

After waiting 6 hours that felt like an eternity, I drove down to Koreatown. The weird thing about tooth pain is that, unlike other pains that come in waves, it's a constantly unpleasant sensation. When you have a headache (or, anyway, when I have a headache) it kind of comes and goes, so I'll feel really ill for a moment and then a bit better. But this toothache was unwavering in its commitment to ruining my day. Nothing would make my tooth feel any better (although biting down produced a sensation that was considerably worse.)

I got to the office, was injected with novocaine and felt about 100 times better immediately. I know it's just to numb you up for a dental procedure, but they really ought to sell individual novocaine shots in a drug store. I've been on pain medication for almost a week now, and no pills really work that well, but a little bit of novocaine and you can't feel shit.

I guess it might be a little unsafe to have people walking around all day injecting shit into their own gums, but it would be worth it for me not to have to take all these other stupid pills that don't do anything.

But I'm jumping ahead. I had another root canal on Wednesday (my second!) and went home feeling much better. Thursday, I woke up still kind of in pain, but that's okay, as I had been promised by the doctor that a root canal continues to hurt for a few days later.

It's now the following Tuesday, and my teeth still hurt. Not with as much force and passion as they did last week, but I'm not sure such a thing would even be possible. At first, I was just taking handfulls of Advil all the time. The bottle warns that if you take more than the suggested amount, it could possibly make your stomach bleed. But at this point, it was a chance I was willing to take. A regrettably blood-stained stomach is a small price to pay to stop this reprehensible tooth pain.

Eventually, I got tired of the ineffectual nature of OTC ibuprofin, so I called my dad at the dental office and had them call in a prescription for Tylenol with Codeine. I've been taking it for a few days now, but I think I have to stop, as it's making me all loopy. It's kind of like having a time machine. I got home tonight at around 7:30 pm, and was feeling a little out of it, so I put my head down on my pillow for a moment. I just shot up, coming back to life, to discover it's around midnight. And even now, I kind of still feel tired. When I'm done writing this, I might just go back to sleep and call it a night. In fact, I think I might do that right noawapjwieoa;fwieapojfo