Surgery

Purpose: To describe the experience of getting my wisdom teeth out and get the reader to reflect on the bad experiences of their lives.

Intended Receiver: Teens who have gotten their wisdom teeth out or are planning to, people who have gone through bad experiences in their lives, people (especially teens) who have regrets and are angry at life for what has happened to them.

The appointment had already been cancelled three times. Twice by me, because of scheduling conflicts, and once by the orthodontist. In June, I didn’t think is wise to get it done the weekend before exams. In July, I couldn’t get time off work. In August, we got a call half an hour before I was supposed to go in, telling us that my appointment was cancelled because something technical wasn’t working. Throughout these three months, I was in utter anguish as four determinedly vindictive bones punched, kicked, and bit their way through my gums like mixed martial artists in a grudge match. It was horrible, debilitating pain that kept me from concentrating and ruined my chances of getting a good night’s sleep. I was getting desperate.

Finally, I was given a day: September 26th. Then, a time: ten o’clock a.m. My father went to Costco and came back with a twenty-four pack of pudding. My mother bought boxes of chicken broth and stacks of wash cloths. I set up my bed so that I could sleep sitting up. We were prepared — or so I thought.

The day came. I woke up at 8:45, starving and afraid. I had heard all sorts of horror stories — about not being frozen enough, about the surgeon making mistakes — and my biggest fear was that they wouldn’t put me under, that I would be awake and aware during the procedure. I’m one of those people who despise the dentist; in fact, my hatred of dental health professionals goes so deep that I find myself crying through ordinary checkups. It was for this reason that I chose to go to the orthodontist, rather than letting my family dentist handle the surgery — the latter would just have frozen my face, but the former was sure to sedate me.

Even so, it was with no small amount of trepidation and anxiety that I donned my most comfortable clothes and let my mother do my hair in two long braids, to keep my hair out of my face and let me lie flat. The closer we got to the office, the more stressed I became. By the time my mother and I opened the door and started up the long, steep flight of stairs, my asthma was acting up so badly that I could barely force the numbers out as I counted the steps.

“Counting?” my mother asked me, a small smile making her lips twitch. I nodded, not trusting myself to speak lest I lose focus. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. Seventeen stairs. That meant I had seventeen steps to navigate in my less-than-lucid state on the way back down. I shared the stair count with my mother, who told me that she would remember.

We sat together in the waiting room; me, reading an interview with John Updike in a Time Magazine, my mother talking to another mother who was waiting for her son to emerge, wisdom-tooth-less, from the operating room. At some point my father arrived, laden with breakfast for his wife. Annoyed, I moved to the other side of the room. I hadn’t eaten for twelve hours, and the smell of the Tim Horton’s breakfast sandwich would only have added to my discomfort. As my stress level increased, I found it harder and harder to focus on the article before me. I took in enough to realise that Updike’s novel, Terrorist, might be a worthwhile read, but mainly I found myself stuck on words I didn’t understand (one such word being ‘septuagenarian’).

Then the nurse called my name, and time started shifting. I seemed to move more slowly than usual while the world around me went five times as fast. They set me down in the chair, tied a towel around my head, pushed the sleeves of my sweater up and started tying on a tourniquet. Their faces seemed far-away and distant; I couldn’t focus on any of them except the one woman I knew, who was holding my hand. The orthodontist chatted harmlessly as he struggled to find the veins in my right arm. I responded as best as I could, but as soon as he stabbed me the first time I lost my train of thought. It hurt far more than it should have, and tears started leaking out before I could control them. The tourniquet was undone and retied down on my forearm, and I was stabbed again, this time in my wrist. Almost immediately, the needle was gone, and a voice was saying “Let’s try the other arm.” I wanted to scream as they all swarmed around my left arm instead. I had donated blood from my right arm, I knew there was a vein they could hit there. They didn’t need to stab me more and cause me more pain. But I stayed silent, and they tied the tourniquet above my left elbow. Within seconds, they loosened it and retied it lower down. There was another pinch of pain in my wrist, but this time it didn’t immediately vanish. It kept burning, and I was able to focus my vision enough to see the orthodontist popping vial after vial of something into the contraption that was stuck in my skin .

Something was wrong. This was when they were supposed to tell me to count backwards from five, wasn’t it? Wasn’t the world supposed to be going blurry as I fell under the spell of the sedative? Wasn’t I supposed to fall asleep?

I didn’t. All of a sudden, there were hands in my mouth and overwhelming pressure, and I found myself crying, twitching and jerking around as my breathing became more and more ragged and an inescapable fear gripped me like a vice . My worst fear was being realised. I was awake and aware. I knew I should relax, that I should try to calm myself, slow down my breathing, make it easier for the people who were ripping out my teeth, but I couldn’t. I had lost control of myself, and the only thing on my mind was that pressure; the horrifying, terrible pressure. I remember someone, maybe the orthodontist, yelling “Enough, Lucy!” as they fought to keep me still and my out-of-control body fought back.

I don’t know how long it lasted. In retrospect, it could only have taken ten minutes, but time didn’t feel like moving properly for me. I had no sense at all of what they were doing. All I knew was that I was in a situation where I had no control over myself and where I was more afraid than I’d ever been in my life. Nothing in my eighteen years had prepared me for this.

Suddenly, they were gone. It was over. A gentle hand was holding mine, I was being helped to my feet, and the world spun around me as I tried to put one foot in front of the other, to keep moving. They brought me to a bed, laid me down, and told me that I couldn’t leave until I started breathing properly. I hadn’t noticed that I was still crying, still hyperventilating. I tried to breath, but every few milliseconds my breath caught and sent waves of anger and panic through me. Later, I learned that they couldn’t sedate me because my breathing was so bad. It would have been far too dangerous.

My mother arrived, sat beside me and said “Go to Hogwarts, Lucy”. These were magic words that sent a rush of relief flowing through me. I brought my knees up so that my feet were flat on the bed and forced myself to take deep breaths while images of the ancient castle and Harry Potter went flying around in my mind. The fear dissipated like fog in a warm breeze, but another emotion took its place. I didn’t want to say it aloud, so I grabbed my mother’s hand and tried to write it on skin. She didn’t understand, so I gave up and asked her “Am I ugly?” The words came out garbled and I could barely understand them myself, but she smiled and said “No, you’re not ugly. You look fine.”

I made it down the stairs without incident. I remembered the number, and I counted them as I went, clinging to the handrail with one hand and my mother with the other. The new emotion was still burning like a wildfire in me, but I couldn’t put it into words. Talking was painful, and I didn’t want to bleed all over my clothes. Once we got to the car, however, I used (rather effective) sign language and got my parents to give me a pen and paper, so I could write down what I was feeling.

The reason I went to Dr. Morgan was so that I wouldn’t be aware of the fact that there were people’s hands in my mouth. But I was lucid the whole time. It kind of defeats the purpose. I handed to book to my father, who read it and responded: “Yeah, kinda sucks don’t it?”

So I’m kinda pissed off about that. Like, my brain is totally normal save for a mild headache.

That didn’t begin to cover the irrational anger I felt. They had betrayed me, and at the time I felt as though I would never forgive them. But my father’s response threw me far enough to knock a bit of the ire out of me.

“Yeah, but the headache will pass and this will just be a bad memory eventually — one more to add to your bad memory collection that you use to write dark poems and macabre stories. Rock on!”

As annoyed as I was by that assessment (which I responded to with a scathing written remark that stated: You should really try to keep up with my creative evolution) I realised that he was right. The experience was over, and now it was just a memory. It was something that I could look back on, as horrible as it was, and say “Hey, I survived that.”

Even later on, when I was less angry at the orthodontist and more at myself — which I put into words by writing: I felt like a really bad patient. I was breathing badly and crying, but I just couldn’t stop. I tried, I really did. But I couldn’t control myself. — I found it almost cleansing. Even while I lamented over the fact that I had to clamp down on blood-soaked gauze for hours and hours (I can’t stand the taste of blood, I wrote. I’ll never be a good vampire) I realised that this experience hadn’t made me a worse person. Instead, it had added to my empathy and to my moral compass.

Every experience, no matter how terrible it seems and how hard it is to overcome, is worthwhile. A person should never regret anything that happens to them, or get mad at the world or other people because of it. Life is too precious to regret a single moment, and the world is too beautiful to hate. Even if you get hurt, even if the world turns dark and cold, even if you feel as though everyone is out to get you, you should never regret an experience. It’s the things we go through that make us who we are. If I hadn’t waited so long for surgery and hadn’t built it up to be such a huge, terrifying thing, things might have been different. I may not have changed in the same way. All in all, I’m happy I went through this. After all, if I don’t have bad experiences, how am I supposed to grow?