Once upon a time, when I was twenty, I stumbled out of a building, stumbled into a car, used the car as an extension of my body to stumble across a freeway to a faraway hospital, and then stumbled from the car to the emergency room where I collapsed in the arms of a beautiful nurse who was wearing a miniskirt, and who assured me in comforting southern tones that everything was going to be all right.
A great man can admit when he's told a lie. I can admit that I may have played with history to make a terrible day a little more interesting. You can hardly blame me, though, as I found out a little while later that I had meningitis, and my memory of that day, along with most that have followed, is a tad blurry. Part of the meningitis discovery process was to puncture a hole in my spine to draw a bit of fluid. That part isn't relevant to this post, but I feel like someone should answer for what is a process that would be at home in one of those wax museums where you can see recreations of all the fine moments in history when men apparently spent most of their time locking each other in small boxes with spikes on the walls.
Several days after Diagnosis Day, my parents stopped by with some Indian food. I was thankful, but I wanted them to leave so that I could get back to dying. The pain was so severe that I wouldn't have minded if my body melted on my bed like cheese on toast (I don't eat cheese on toast myself, but my sister used to love it, and, although the dish repulsed me, I did enjoy watching that cheese melt).
I also wanted to die because my French professor didn't care that I had meningitis - he wanted me to take the semester final anyway. Like it mattered. I was only the best god damned speaker of the French language in my entire row of that class. That put me well ahead of two other people, one of whom I dated because I liked the way she liked my shoes. I'll date anything that can recognize the awesomeness of my shoes, and that includes lab rats who would choose to approach my shoes in a maze rather than a pile of cocaine. I always wondered how the rats did coke. Like, do they have little rat razor blades and little rat snorty straws? And do they talk about themselves all night while having great business ideas? I don't know. But, like I said, if they'd rather sniff out my Tod's than go party at the other end of the maze with their rat cocaine in their little rat discotheque, then I'd be willing to give it a try. You never know. I could even get lucky and score two.
I do this sometimes. I mean, I have a reason for writing this post, but somewhere along the way it became about dating cokefiend lab rats who like my shoes. If you like it, then I should dig up some of my old math tests with story problems on them. I always felt they were lacking something. The characters were one dimensional, and there was no life, no energy, no plot.
See? That was me doing that thing where I get tangential. I'm not going to finish that tangent. I leave it as an exercise to the reader.
The effing point is, meningitis hurt. Way bad. Like, when you're succumbing to the feeling of being pounded in the face with an anvil every time you take a breath, you start to think that, if you're going to hurt like this, you should at least be allowed to experience the real thing rather than some third rate biological reproduction of the consequences of face-anvil-smashing. It was too much like diet soda, which I hate. If I'm going to poison myself, then give me the good stuff.
I thought meningitis would be the greatest pain I would ever feel. One of the reasons I'm so paranoid and careful about handshaking is that I never want to wind up in that situation again. I don't even care if meningitis isn't caused by dirty handshakes. I'm not touching you.
When I felt a little pain in my number thirty molar (right side, rear, second from the back) on Saturday, I ignored it. It was nothing like meningitis, which meant is wasn't a threat.
The pain continued into Sunday, but grew more intense. The tooth hurt constantly, and I could no longer chew with that half of my mouth.
It was, however, a sweet sort of pain. It had that pleasant throbbing that indicates pressure, and that pressure indicates eventual release, and that release would be a moment of relief.
By this morning, the pain had grown even stronger. I couldn't focus because I kept having this little daydream about getting hit in a very specific part of my face by that anvil I mentioned a few paragraphs back. Not because I expected the anvil would fix anything, but because death by anvil would be a nice distraction from the pain.
I went in to see my dentist. It was a pain in the ass because I took my I-met-a-meth-freak-on-the-freeway car into the shop today. I had no convenient way of getting out to my dentist (who, by the by, is hot). When I got there, she took an x-ray and then told me that something called a "nerve" had been living inside my tooth, and it was now dead. I thought this sounded like a victory. The "nerve" (is that a stupid word or what?) was clearly squatting, probably working with its lawyer to figure out how long it would have to remain before my tooth would legally become its property.
Unfortunately, the victory was only partial. Yes, the pesky nerve was no longer occupying my tooth, but a family of bacteria moved in to take its place. Why my mouth is party effing' central is beyond me. I suppose I'll wake up tomorrow morning to find a pack of wild dogs nestled under my tongue or something. Which might not be all that bad now that I think about it, as I expect the dogs would have a turf war with the bacteria. Actually, screw that - I don't need my tongue in harm's way (yes: harm is also living in my mouth).
My hot dentist told me that I'd have to go see this other not-hot dentist down the street to have the bacteria evicted. I was thrilled. The moment of relief from the strangely satisfying pain was going to be mine. All mine.
The procedure to be performed was called a "root canal." Don't know if you've heart of it. The root canal dentist told me the procedure would be fairly painless because the nerve was, as I've established, dead. This was another reason for me to celebrate the passing of the nerve. No nerve, no pain. At least not nerve pain. There were about twelve other types of pain huddled together around my tooth, but I can proudly say none of them was because of the nerve.
Thirty minutes in, I decided that root canals are lame. I had such high hopes, but the dentist put this strange dam over my face, and it prevented me from talking. I like to mumble a little so that the dentist has to stop and remove everything from my mouth because they think I'm going to say something like, "I need a mixture of 75% nitrous and 25% oxygen," but I'm not - I'm going to talk about whatever random thought wandered into my head right then. I see it as a way of sharing the pain of modern dentistry.
The other element of the root canal I didn't care for was the odor that wafted into my nose (he didn't dam my nose up) when the bacterial orgy finally started, like, squirting or something out of my tooth. I mean, not only were the little bastards unlawfully occupying my number thirty molar, but they were evidently also throwing up the whole time.
As bad as they smelled, it was still satisfying to hear them scream as they were washed away with the fancy handheld water faucet apparatus the dental assistant was using. Unlike the dentist, I could tell - I could see it in her eyes - that she wanted to hear whatever random thought was running through my head. I wanted to give her what she wanted, but I'm a one guy, one dental professional sort of person. Also, she could never truly love me, as she also probably smelled the bacterial sewer that was my mouth.
Only phase one of the root canal was completed today. The dentist doesn't want to continue until I've completed a course of antibiotics. In the meantime, he installed a temporary filling to plug the hole he made in my $962 crown.
I walked home, sat down with some food, and tried to figure out how to eat it without biting my tongue off. My face was still numb from the Novocain. It was a big, useless, rubbery, useless, and also useless thing.
It did eventually wear off, though, and I was glad about it because the numbness gave way to a tingling that gave way to the most excruciating pain I've ever felt. It was worse than meningitis. It was worse than the time I accidentally went camping on a landmine. It was even, somehow, worse than the time my mother accidentally slammed my finger in the door of her late 70s Saab 900. Of course, it was an old Saab, and after it hurt my finger, it went on to ruin the lives of everyone in the entire family, but that's another story for another time. We just all hope mum learned her lesson about aging cars from countries where nobody speaks an identifiable language and where engines are assembled by robots driven by random number generators. Not that I don't like Saabs; I do. If it weren't for Saabs, my parents might still be together today, and you can imagine the kind of stress that would cause.
The pain was bad enough that I was wishing I had accepted the opioid pain killer offered to me. I turned it down because, if I never have to stick another opioid in my body again, it'll be just fine with me. But, still... it hurt so badly that I considered going and standing in the road until someone ran over me. I didn't because the pain was too great, and I didn't have time for a Bellevue driver to get going fast enough to really do some damage. Once again, the worst, slowest drivers on the face of the Earth failed me. I also didn't have time to walk in a straight line until some idiot veered over and nailed me from the side.
So I went back to see the dentist.
Without any anaesthetic, he popped the temporary filling off, stuck a needle thing into my tooth hole, and then notified me that my tooth was getting all squirty again. The pressure from bacterial lovemaking and Olympic barfing was the cause of the discomfort I'd been feeling.
After draining the fluid into several large pans (from the appearance and consistency, you might think he had been changing my oil, but a sniff of the substance would have canceled this thought before it went any further), he sent me on my way, but without the temporary filling. My particular bacteria are unusually fruitful reproducers, and I have to have the open tooth so that all the bacteria babies can crawl out of the tooth to meet their doom.
Not-hot dentist is going to seal the tooth again either tomorrow or the next day, but until then, I get to live with the pleasure of the odor and flavor of bacterial vomit spilling over into my mouth.
Good day.