Progress! in Everyday Ramblings

Thanks for your good wishes for the dental procedures yesterday. Nimrod let me work from home in the morning, in spite of the new restrictive policy on telecommuting and that was most helpful. I was able to carve out enough time after I logged out to do the physiological rebalancing yoga practice for folks suffering from anxiety.

It helped.

I felt relatively calm walking down to the clinic and grateful I could walk. Everybody is very nice there but the front office staff is sometimes a little more relaxed than professional and I had to wait for them to complete calls (every word of which I heard) before they checked me in. I was a few minutes, maybe seven minutes early.

Forty-five minutes later (after being checked in) I was thinking either the top of my head was going to blow off or I was going to bolt. Bolting was beginning to seem like a reasonable idea, clearly it wasn’t meant to be, I could go home, go to the gym, eat a nice crunchy dinner la de da…

Finally, a wonderful OR nurse came out and apologized and said they’d be ready for me soon. By this time I was pacing in front of the beautiful river front view they have up there like the pony I am. If she hadn’t been so warm and so understanding I would have gone, okay fine, bye, never mind, don’t know why I signed up for this insane thing… I was very very close to going…

The fully experienced life is… challenging at times.

And then I was signing the release forms and getting numbed up. I thought I was going to have to wait for the numbing medicine to work but they used this amazing fast acting stuff. I won’t go into too much detail for the faint of heart but to say that it took them over an hour to get one of my determined back teeth out. It shattered, made fragile by earlier work to try to save it, and the surgeon was being very careful not to puncture my sinus on that side.

Two hours after that and a whole new round of numbing agents later we were finally done.

They had hoped to be able to place the first implant in too but I have an unruly root so they will do that in a few months when we start the other half of the work and I have a CT Scan.

I look like I have had a stroke. My face is all swollen and bruised and my mouth droops but everything is functional. They told me I was a remarkably calm patient; that I did really well. Ha! Little did they know I was thinking oh gosh (in the confines of my head I may have used a little stronger language in my catastrophizing) this is going to take f-o-r-e-v-e-r to heal and I will look awful and in spite of what the doctor said I won’t be able to teach and…

The nurse that was assisting with my surgeon had just returned to work after having surgery on her neck after a woman in her late fifties rear ended her while texting her gym to see if they were open. They had placed an implant in her neck to protect the compression from pushing on a nerve. It took her five months to return to work. Wow. That sort of put my situation in perspective.

The amazing Kes had driven up while I was having the work done, stopped at the yummy high end deli downstairs from this brand new state of the art clinic and hung out with both my cats and then later with other family members waiting for their persons.

It is a good thing I like rice pudding. :) Kes instructed the cats to take good care of me and they are doing an excellent job. In spite of the swelling and bruising I will be able to teach Monday. We are looking at starting a Wednesday class in two weeks to help with the overflow interest in the class.

I am most intrigued and looking forward seeing how that will all unfold.

Two classes a week is perfect right now because then I don’t invest all my focus in just the one class. It is better for the students too as they can come to one or the other or both…

I admit that last night was rough. There was a lot of pain, more than the codeine they gave me could handle. I’ve been so very lucky that the only other time I had worse pain I was in the hospital and the gave me morphine. But the worst in over.

The doctor did say that it was the right decision. He said there was a pretty serious infection in my jaw and he is certain that my overall health will be more robust now that the problem teeth are out.

That is the best news I have personally heard in a good long while.

Last updated February 06, 2016