Diary of a Wolfeman

So for the past two days I have been dealing with my impacted wisdom tooth, which is slowly crushing the teeth in my lower-left jawline. “Painful” is too mild a word. Take a red-hot poker and place the tip at the base of your jaw just below your ear. Now brace the front of your mouth on a brick wall and have someone stand behind you with a huge-ass jackhammer and drive that fucker forward against the poker as hard as they can.

Now multiply that feeling by about 10, and you’ve got what I was feeling last night. Seriously. It got so bad at one point I was actually considering using my handy Gerber multi-pliers to rip out one of my molars, which would at least make room for the other remaining teeth to move around a bit. I actually had the pliers in my hand.

Tolerant, however, came to my rescue! Having had similar pain issues in the past, she had a couple prescription-grade painkillers in the medicine cabinet that she brought over for me. That Angel actually walked over to my house at 11 o’clock just to deliver them! These cut the pain enough for me to get to sleep, and that’s when my funky pain-tolerance system finally kicked in.

I don’t know how it does it, but my brain is able somehow to simply ignore nerve input when it needs to – this has come in very handy at times, lemme tell you. Once the meds cut the pain enough for me to sleep, my brain must have decided that the nerves in question were malfunctioning and severely reduced their say in how lousy I was going to be feeling. By morning, I was only suffering mild discomfort, the sort which is easily handled by Excedrin and friends.

I’m not totally in the clear yet – one of my molars has been tilted forward, which means my teeth meet earlier now and in kind of an odd way, and this is the most sensitive tooth currently. I have to be careful eating, but I can get by. In a week or so I will have adjusted to it and will be fine until the next shift in pressure. With any luck, I’ll only have to go through this one more time before December, when my insurance will start and I can go to the dentist to get this permanently fixed.

In the meantime, though, if you see me pacing the hallway with pliers in my hand, just knock my ass out.