Emergency Dental Extraction

Last week I felt some pain in a tooth. Nothing major but enough to make me set up a dental appointment. I expected a 30 minute something or other. Instead I was told that I had a cracked tooth. Apparently it's fairly rare. There were a number of people checking my x-rays, wiggling my tooth. This isn't a Joe Didn't Brush sort of thing. I eat a lot of almonds and I figure I caught one of the hard ones at the wrong angle. I don't remember it cracking but it does seem like a few weeks ago that it started to feel loose when I flossed. Who knows. Just my luck.

The remedy... how bad could it be, I figured? Pretty bad. The tooth had to be extracted immediately. Well, ok... I'll get a fake tooth, right? Yes, in ten months. Huh? The extraction heals for four months and then an implant is drilled into my jawbone. Then that takes six months to heal after which a fake tooth can be installed. My immediate fear was that I'm going to be doing a lot of meetings over the next 10 months and Missin' Tooth Joe isn't nearly as good at selling Big Data services as All Tooth Joe. Dr. Snyder spent the time to talk me through it. I could get a fake tooth. But in his estimation it would make it hard to talk. Bad Talking Joe is even worse than Missin' Tooth Joe. And Dr. Snyder assured me that it wouldn't be as visible as I thought. The tooth is on the bottom right, halfway between the front and back teeth. I was skeptical. But he was right.

On Tuesday I went to a dental surgeon... Dr. Silverstein. Text book author and world tour speaker. Nice guy. Willing to explain what he's doing. The procedure was quick. And violent. I've had plenty of adult teeth out. Never anything like this. Afterwards I was numb. Made it home. Showed the kids the hole in my teeth. And promptly hit the floor from pain. The anesthetic wore off all of a sudden and it was miserable. I should have taken the pain pill the moment I left the surgeon's office. Holy tamole. One of the worse hours of my life waiting for it to kick in. Not kidding.

Yesterday was fairly bad too. Lots of pain. I took some pain meds in the morning but by 11am didn't want to take any more. I'm terrified that I'll have some sort of mini-withdrawl headache on a 10 hour flight tomorrow. I wanted that junk out of my system. Which made yesterday rough.

Today was no picnic. But it was better than yesterday. Some swelling but so far no bruising. We'll see. Travel for work all next week. Convention, manning a booth... need to be crisp and presentable.

The lesson? Don't eat almonds? I don't know.