Foreign Objects

Before all these "medical adventures" happened in my life things like getting blood drawn, going to the doctor, or going to the dentist would be events that would cause me to stop eating for a week out of sheer nervousness. Now when it comes to medical things life is much more... certain. I am certain that most of the time I won't like what is going on, but I'll have a better idea of who is doing it and what they are doing.

Yesterday up until my appointment at the dentist I was fine. Before we left Lisa asked me, "Do you want to go now?" and I replied, "You make it sound like I have more of an option in this than I do." Not 15 minutes later the receptionist at the dentist asked me, "Do you want to follow me back?" which I said again, "You make it sound more optional than it is."

Yes it's true I could have ran out of there and no one would have stopped me, but still, when they tell you something like, "You have a cavity" or "you have tumors that will kill you" you kind of need to DO something about it. No matter how you feel about it at the moment. You can hem and haw all you like but really if you don't do something about it soon, it will become worse.

Which is why I found myself suddenly sweating like MAD the other morning. (Question: why do they make those dentist chairs out of the material they do? It did nothing but reflect every bit of heat my body was sending out back AT my body.) I'm not a big fan of things in my mouth and my tongue has a nasty habit of expelling foreign objects no matter what the rest of me might think. (Note: foreign objects includes non-edible things like metal, misc sealants, and jello.)

I was fully expecting it to be a horrible experience. And while it's not something I would go back for again (where did I put my floss?) it also wasn't as horrible as I imagined that drilling out a tooth and packing silver into the hole would be. Some of that might have been offset by the fact that I couldn't feel the left side of my face until four hours after. This not only included my lips and side of my tongue, but my left ear as well... which made for an interesting experience. It's at time's like that that you realize how much you don't think about and/or feel your ears when things are going well.

So now I have a filling. It's nice and silver and despite the fact that I brush my teeth fairly often I am pretty sure I will be minding them a bit more now. Especially as it seems this has seemed to happen because of chemo. I might complain that this wasn't in any of the "chemo warning" sheets I had gotten, but I don't know that I have read the three or four pages of warnings and memorized them anyway.

Despite the heavy sweating for thirty minutes and the heavy concentration on my mouth to make sure my tongue wasn't doing something it wasn't supposed to, and the hours of numbness that followed it was really a pretty good experience. (When compared to a lot of medical experiences I've endured) In answer to the receptionist, I guess I do want to follow you back.


~B.
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