Sunday, September 21, 2008

When what you fear the most meets you halfway...


It’s a gorgeous day out there today near as I can tell. The sun is shining with the proverbial ‘not a cloud in the sky’ sky. Hopefully its an omen of good things to come. Not that things have been bad... just sort of staid is all.

And in the ‘it never rains but it pours category’... around the end of July my eyes started to bother me. Itchy, watery- I thought it was just allergies. But it seemed to get progressively worse until I woke up one Sat morning and my eyes were so swollen and red and... crusty... ick.... that I could barely open them. Luckily my eye doc is right down the street and she squeezed me in. The diagnosis was Pink Eye.... PINK EYE?? I was so grossed out. There’s such a stigma attached to that particular diagnosis I felt dirty. The treatment was fairly simple. She gave me some drops to take every 3 hours and sent me on my way, rescheduling a recheck in a few days. But it also vamped up my OCD a notch, like I needed THAT. So now I have hand sanitzer everywhere and I try to cover my hands with my sleeves before touching public doors and so forth, and if I can’t I won’t touch my face until I can wash my hands.

So a week.. ten days... later I get the all clear. Eagerly pop in brand new contacts and make an appt to get new glasses because mine had to be at least 10 years old. But then... a few days later... familiar sensations are returning... what... how.... god damn its back. Off to the doc I go again to confirm its flared up again. But how? HOW? Then something occurred to me... without even thinking I do believe I used the same mascara..... ooopppsssss.... So I bought some cheap make up to use until I was all clear... then tossed that and started with new brushes and mascara, etc. It killed me to have to throw out a pot of MAC Fluidline only a few months old, but I’d rather just have to plunk down $18 for a new one and $12 for a brush then have to toss out ANOTHER set of contacts and go through that grossness again.

So my eyes are all wonderful again and I have a fabulous new pair of glasses that look like they were created in this century. But.... isn’t there always a but... while I was dealing with my eyeballs... sometime back in March I began to have some discomfort in the back of my mouth from a tooth on the top. Nothing major at the time... but like my eyes... it got progressively worse to the point that around the same time I was dealing with the eye problem I would have these random unbelievable pains shooting from it that would stop just as quickly as they’d start. And as if that wasn’t enough... I have a tooth on the other side on the bottom that had a piece break off about 8 years ago and had been fixed twice after the repair had broken about a year or so later. I called it my Bionic Tooth because my dentist basically used filling to rebuild it back up to what it was so it was half silver. He wanted to do a Crown but my insurance wouldn’t cover it so we went this route. He had warned me at the time he didn’t know if it would hold but it did all these years.... until I got a cavity in between the good part and the filling part. It wasn’t hurting me at all but the crevasse was getting bigger and I could feel little pieces of the good part breaking off. Eventually it got to the point that I could feel the silver part lifting up and I knew there wasn’t much left holding it in and I couldn’t chew anything on that side. And then... and THEN a piece broke off the upper back tooth, leaving a really sharp dagger that rubbed against my cheek and that was it. I couldn’t put it off anymore. I had a very small area left to chew my food and I knew once my daughter asked if we could go have Chinese food and I said No all because I was afraid to eat it... well... once you start messing with my food.... well that’s it.

So I drove everyone at work crazy asking who their dentist was, did they like them, and what about the pain... I finally settled on a place and made an appt.

Its not that I was necessarily afraid of the dentist because I loved my last dentist... literally (snicker). But when I first went to him for the aforementioned broken tooth the very first time I admitted I had been avoiding the dentist for a very long time due to fear from a previous barbaric dentist as a child. Don’t get me wrong- the man was sweet... and everyone went to him... but lets face it, dentistry 30 years ago was something you lost sleep over. So I admitted I was quite afeared. But he was a brand new dentist right out of school with all the latest tricks at his disposal so the procedure was painless. Luckily my teeth weren’t in that bad of shape- two small cavities and a root canal and I was all fixed up. Even after the root canal, which I had cancelled twice before I finally went through with it... when he announced he was done 15 minutes later I said ‘That’s it?!" and he said Ayup. I said ‘No way! Gimme another one!" Then he told me to get out of his chair.

So I tried to keep my mind off it as much as possible and kept telling myself there was no point because it had to be done. My teeth were messed up and needed to be fixed. So yesterday off I trotted to my brand new dentist, praying to the gods of such things to please be kind. So after he had a looky see and took an xray he gave me the news I was dreading to hear but had a feeling was exactly what was going to happen which is why I was avoiding going... the teeth couldn’t be saved. They had to come out.

But oddly enough... I kind of went... eeeeeehhhhh... but I don’t remember feeling sick or nervous. I felt more of that previous in the week just thinking of going. But now that I was there it was more resolve that this is what had to be done and I think I was more anxious to get it over with so I wouldn’t have to deal with it anymore. So I asked him when we could get this over with... and he said I could name the place and the time... and I’m thinking, this is my worst effng nightmare... I won’t sleep thinking about it... so I asked him if we could do it today and he said absolutely. I felt so relieved and he looked happy I decided to just go for it. I told him I just wanted to get it over with and he agreed that was the best thing.

He knew I was nervous and him and his assistant were great. He made sure I was good and frozen, even having to give me a few more shots in the back one because it didn’t seem to want to freeze. That one came out relatively easily, just as he said it would, and the second one he had to drill through to basically split it in two because there wasn’t much left to grab onto. I got a few zings from hitting the nerve and for the first time I actually smelled smoke during the drilling... that was odd. And speaking of odd... they have tv’s in the ceilings and they put it on for me and we decided on Dumb and Dumber and in the middle of him yanking on my tooth one of them makes a boobie joke and I start laughing, which makes the dentist and his assistant laugh.
So its all over and done with and most of my face is frozen and packed with gauze and I’m sitting there feeling relieved and happy and really pretty proud of myself for being a brave little soldier. I have a pretty high pain tolerance... thank god... so I’m not much afraid of most things... but the thought of having sharp things in my mouth sends me over the edge.

But honestly.... after that... hahahh I really can’t see there’s anything left for me to be afraid of. He said the rest of my teeth are still in pretty good shape so two teeth going at the same time was just a coincidence and not indicative of some larger problem going on he suspected might be the cause.

PHEW.


Np- "Love Remains the Same" – Gavin Rossdale