A Daily Thing

5 of my teeth are no longer at risk of dying.  Here is what was involved:

• More canisters of anaesthetic than I dare to count, administered over multiple injections.
• The discovery that while I was tooting in my head about said injections not really bothering me (and trying to act all cool and not look at the syringe), my internal dialogue of ‘Whatever’ quickly got replaced by ‘Ow ow ow, OW OW’.  Not as cool.
• It is very hard to speak English with half your face paralysed (and no one at the dentist’s office spoke French, so I had to suffer the indignity).  Also very hard: opening your mouth to look at what several hours of pain got you.
• That bib they put on you, it’s not an inside joke to make you look stupid: it’s a selfless gesture meant to minimise your humiliation when you spit out water all over yourself, since half your face is paralysed.
• A large amount of anaesthetic takes a long time to wear off.  Close to 4 or 5 hours in fact.  My breakfast (5AM, hello!) was long gone by the time I came home (12:30).  I decided to take a nap before lunch so I could chew my food on both sides.  I was not impressed when I woke up to find out my face was still half frozen.  So I stuffed my baked risotto in my right cheek and tried not to bite the left one too much while chewing.
• A fuzzy afternoon trying to work while on an ibuprofen/codeine/left-over anaesthetic cocktail.
• A pretty ‘boufigue*’ on the left side of my face today.  Looks great.

Still 4 teeth left to go.  If anything else goes wrong after that, I swear I’m getting all of them pulled out.

*In Provence, it means a swollen cheek.  My uncle describing his dental problems always involves a lot of gesturing and using the word ‘boufigue’ emphatically.  Some of the biggest laughs in my life – hands down.