Tooth Extraction Part 1: Tale of a Disabled Eater

Part 1

Six years. It's been nearly six years since I pulled out my first wisdom tooth. Pulled out is a tame word. It was more like diced into a pieces mercilessly by a newbie dentist who sliced right through my gums to destroy the impacted (meaning turned to the side) tooth. A few hours and a Vicodin pill later, I was languishing on my bed nursed by the mother with the vague thought that the pain would end one day. Fast forward. Since then I've pulled out two of my upper wisdom teeth which weren't impacted. I waited until they poked out like gophers waiting to be plucked by my dentist's pliars (MY dentist, last time as an underling, going forward I made sure it was Dr. Suh, our family friend). Those were expertly extracted within fiften minutes with only slight uses of Novacain. I was happily eating in a few hours.

An interesting subtext to this drama is that over the past five years I've developed something of a terrible habit - grinding my teeth at night. Previous roommates of mine have found this either annoying or simply unbearable. There's nothing I can do about it, except get a molded rubber nightguard which I tend to spit out unconsciously. Teeth grinding results in TMJ, short for temporal-mandible joint. This means I can have terrible pains in my jaws for a few days a year and anything requiring extensive jaw action is inevitably the end of comfortable chewing for an extended period of time. And the one thing that's similar to screwing up the sensitive TMJ and throwing a wrench into my chewing is an hour-long session of pulling out my final impacted wisdom tooth.

Before long came D-Day. Dentist-Day. I'd been putting off my final tooth for years. Even when I finally made an appointment, I found excuse after excuse to put it off, postpone, hoping to allay the foreseen pain and suffering I'd have to exhume from the graves of my memory.

I prepared myself throughout the week and allocated a Friday afternoon for the event, hoping to use the weekend to recover. Christine found a way to keep me in good spirits, accompanying me for a final meal. My last meal before mushy food fit for senior citizens and toddlers was in order.

We settled on Bua Siam, a cheerful shoebox of a strip-mall Thai joint in North Hollywood, with day-glo green walls, Ikea furniture and $2.99 small plates of authentic Northern Thai cuisine. We shared the shrimp paste on crunchy rice cakes and bay-leaf Thai "Spaghetti" made with rice noodles. Crunchy - something I'd need to enjoy before the procedure. We had a slew of other dishes before stopping by a generic donut shop for a final treat.


Shrimp paste with rice crackers.

"thai" spaghetti with a strong bay leaf sauce. A little too strong for Christine, but I liked it.

Rice noodles with chopped pork. Quite good in flavor but not well put together in terms of construction.

Thai Boat Noodles. Not as deep in flavor as Sapp Coffee Shop's, but at $2.99 I can't complain.

We were still hungry so we had this pork dish that was a bit sweet but it satisfied our desire for something "carb-y."

Bua Siam
12924 Sherman Way
North Hollywood, CA 91605
(818) 765-8395

We arrived at the Dentist's Office, I took a deep breath, Christine waited in the waiting room and cheered me on while I crossed the divide into the fifth Circle of mouth-pain, quite simply an Eater's worst nightmare.

I'll take this second to ponder the important of our body's eating mechanism. Have you ever wondered the amazing equipment we have to consume so many varied foods from around the world? The human is able to consume multitude of foods with a wide spectrum of tastes, textures, and chemical compositions. We're hard-wired to eat both meat and vegetables, grain and fungi. Our teeth are designed to chew through all of these things, while our olfactory and palate determine the nutritional and culinary value of each thing we eat. Then our bodies take the food, accompanied by saliva and the gyration of our dextrous tongue and swallow the food down a tiny little hole to be deftly processed through the stomach and intestines for the optimal reception and retention of nutrition. Studies have shown that we get the most pleasure from swallowing our food, not just chewing it, but chewing allows us to swallow what we've eaten.

Back to the dentist's chair, I'm awaiting the procedure. Dr. Suh takes a few mighty swipes the Novacain to numb my entire left side. It'll feel like rubbery jello in a few minutes time. Gloves. Scalpel. Drill. Tweezers. Suction. Rinse. Repeat.

Doc was smart enough to give me a weird little object to lodge my mouth open. It helped with my jaws, but it was still a struggle to keep them open for so long and so intensely while Doc was shaving away at my impacted tooth. I'm sure blood was everywhere but I didn't taste or see any of it.

An hour and a half of this. My temporal-mandible joint was shot to hell. My mouth wasn't in pain, but I knew Doc had cut up my gums. Later on I found on he'd made two tiny slits which healed quickly. He's a maestro.

Part 2 coming...