going on a vic ride

I have just swallowed 2 vicodin to help ease the dental horror of a root canal, which marks the grand finale of a year of brand new trauma in my mouth. I didn't have any problems through the first 10 months of the year, and then the dentists called me to remind me about a little procedure known as scaling that needed to happen about a year ago and never did. Scaling's not terrible in and of itself, really, because you get so numbed up that they could be stapling your gums to your lips without giving up the gag. What they're actually doing is shoving tools into your gumline to clean out all the excess tartar. Apparently, if you leave that stuff there, it just keeps building up, leeching calcium from your saliva, until it pushes your gums away from your teeth. My dentist then related the tale of the worst case scenario, a woman who came in and, before they got to work, reached up and removed one of her front teeth and set it on the table like a piece of flair.

But the worst part comes afterwards, as I would sit around and rub my teeth with my tongue, obsessed with how the smooth enamel now felt like licking a sandblasted wall. That eventually goes away and the pink glory of the gums revels in their own cleanliness.

So the root canal just got sprung on me last week, because I have insurance left to use up and, hey, what better way to finish up the year than lying prone on a dental chair with my mouth propped open with a plastic doorstop wedged between my back teeth. After shooting me full of novacaine and then deciding to drill a quick hole and fire some straight into my jawbone because i'm a pussy, the drilling happens.

My dentist lets his patients watch movies if they want, on a headset device that looks like eyeglasses with TVs for lenses. Today it was broken, so I opted for the discman and listened to The Life Aquatic soundtrack as eight million pieces of sucking plastic, poking metal and whirring machinery were shoved into my mouth. The awfulness of the burning-hair smelling smoke climbing out of my mouth and trying to figure out what to do with my tongue made a nice counterpoint to serenading my brain with Portugese David Bowie songs and the metal ward dulcitones of Scott Walker.

After the intital procedure, during which they stopped to shoot me up with more novocaine, somehow, without me even realizing it, they slapped some strange metal and rubber contraption on my face, making me feel like the poster for Saw. After that, it's all a blur. I kept dozing off as they kept shoving little weird needle things into the hole in my tooth and scraped away. I couldn't feel it, and I couldn't really hear it, but I could sense it, the same way abductees just know they've been anally probed. Eventually the CD ran out and I woke up to me just laying there and my dentist saying "Hm. There's bleeding. Okay, we're gonna let that do it's thing. I'll be right back." Then I lay there, something bleeding on the other side of my rubber mouth truss, and cued up Devo's Gut Feeling over and over again to keep from falling asleep.

The procedure took so long that when I left, the numbness had already started to wear off, a sensation I'm not used to happening until I wake up on the couch a few hours later. That's the worst part of the whole experience is the foreverness of it all. Prone in this chair, mouth harnessed lockjaw wide, the endless array of different needles that get inserted into your tooth one by one, doing little circuits and then being exchanged for one just like it.

Fortunately, I somehow got him to write me a script for Vicodin and I confusedly drove my way to the pharmacy, waiting in the nice blue chairs reading John M. Barry's The Great Influenza (thanks, mom) and feeling that old familiar throb starting to kick in.

The pharmacist recommended I not take more than 8 in a day, and we both laughed at how stupid people are that she needs to say that in the first place.

Now I'm doped to the gills, or I'm at least well on my way. Remembering the last time I took Vicodin, this week of work, which looked to be shitty before I left for Christmas and still looks that way, and this last week of 2004, which looked to be about the same as the other 51, will be a beautiful little dream of floating brainspace, Seu Jorge, Influenza and total, complete chemical joy.

Posted by xtop at December 27, 2004 07:29 PM | TrackBack