On Thursday September 10 I had my wisdom teeth removed at the University of Washington Medical Center. Since my current job makes me medically insured for the first time in my life, I went for routine dental care and the dentist recommended that I have a panoramic x-ray. That showed that my teeth were impacted, and I made the decision to have them removed based on the gnarly-looking x-ray, the dentists’ recommendations, and the uncertainty of my future insurance status, with these factors being against the inconvenience of surgery and the fact that I had no present complaint with my condition.
The surgery went well, I suppose, with no real discomfort after and the major problems in recovery being my inability to practice dental hygiene and the difficulty in eating any non-liquid for about five days after. The hardest part was having the taste of food fouled in my own mouth by my own wounds and blood; everything I ate tasted like garbage so I hardly ate at all. Being sedated was strange. I remember talking to the doctor and some nurse while they fed me nitrous oxide and injected some sedative into me, and as well as I can remember the conversation continued for about five minutes total and then I left. But obviously the conversation had stopped for about 45 minutes while the surgery proceeded, and for whatever reason when I awoke I was unaware of having ever been sedated or even affected by the nitrous or their injected sedative.
While recovering from this surgery, I made my first trip to Vancouver. I had the surgery on Thursday and left by Quick Shuttle on Saturday, with plans to stay at a hostel for three nights and return to work the next Wednesday.