I'm out of wisdom...

Teeth, that is. After 26 years, I finally got my wisdom teeth taken out. All four of them. All were impacted so they had to dig each of them out. The surgery went better than I expected. The recovery was, however, harder than I expected. Between Chris and his parents, they made it possible for me to have two days of no responsibility and no noise! I just slept at Chris's parents house while they traded off watching the kids for me. It was wonderful!

We did have some extra excitement a week after the surgery though. The Sunday after I had them taken out (which was on a Tuesday - election day!), I was watching TV with Chris. It was around 10 at night. All of a sudden, one of the lower sites started bleeding heavily. I put gauze on it and bit down on it and figured that it would stop soon. Time went by and I had to change the gauze about every 20-30 minutes. We eventually went to bed and I once again slept with gauze in my mouth. I woke up about midnight with a mouth full of blood. It wasn't stopping. By this time, I was starting to freak out. I've been known to scare myself, especially when it's night and it's dark. I was starting to have a panic attack. I woke Chris up and told him that it wasn't stopping. He is incoherent at night so he just mumbled something like 'it'll be fine' and 'go to bed'. That wasn't going to cut it. I shook him and said, "Chris! It's not stopping! What should I do!" I think the panic in my voice was starting to show and he actually woke up. His suggestion was to call the ER and ask their opinion on it. I called and they said they couldn't give advice over the phone. Darn HIPAA laws! So I called our insurance's 24 hour nurses help line. By this time it had been bleeding for 3 hours. She told me that I needed to go to the emergency room to stop the bleeding. Oh! That wasn't what I expected! So I drove myself to the emergency room at 2 in the morning. I felt completely out of place there. The other people in the waiting room looked like they obviously needed "emergent" care. I was kinda be-boppin' around. To make a long story shorter, they put a clotting agent on the site (yay! no more stitches!) and sent me home. I finally got to bed at 4 in the morning only to wake up 3 hours later to my two kids plus the one I babysit. Surprisingly enough, that next day wasn't too bad. I made it into my oral surgeon's and the diagnosis: sometimes our bodies have to break tissue down to rebuild it again and apparently mine broke down a blood vessel. It happens. Not often, but it happens. And I did the right thing by going to the ER to get the bleeding to stop. Yay. I did something right.