Grumble, growl, and other grunts….

Well, the four other teeth have been removed. For those keeping score at home – that’s 6 teeth removed in the past two months, and of course 4 wisdom teeth before that, so I’m missing a whopping 10 teeth grand total. (Actually, one of my wisdom teeth was never removed. It just aparently never actually grew in the first place.)

The previous teeth removal session was a breeze – two or three minutes of work, and they were gone. This set of teeth was not NEARLY as cooperative as the others. It took 45 minutes for the proceedure to be completed. He hit me with novacaine (or was it carbo or one of the other variants? I, of course, never stopped to look at the syringe while he was jabin’ it in my mouth 😉 all over the left side of my mouth, then continued to look at things a bit and let the numbness set in. After a bit, he started on it, and extracted the upper left tooth. No problem there. Then he started to mess with the next one back, and I grunted – “Not numb?” he asked. Affirmitive grunt. So he hits it with more stuff (causing me to wince – it passed through who knows how much numb tissue and hit some seriously not numb tissue!). Starts working on the bottom teeth, getting one pulled after a while. Apparently the roots for the bottom teeth run VERY deep, requiring a hell of a lot of work. He went back and picked on the other upper tooth – still not numb, and hits it with more stuff (which by now it’s getting pretty damned sensative after being poked a couple o’ times, and twisted.) He sets about getting the other bottom tooth – again, lots of problems with the roots, and this time about 10 minutes of drilling to get it out. Then he goes back to the top tooth – he prods at it some more. Damned, not numb. He asks me if it is, and I just give the thumbs up – hell with it, I’m not gonna wait all day on one damned tooth. The gums were mostly numb, just not the tooth and the area under it. Of course the tooth only hurt while being extracted – after that, it could no longer complete the circuit and transmit pain to the brain 😉 (However, I have a mental image of this tooth setting in the trashcan, still trying desparitely to transmit pain to my brain 😉 I’m just really glad the upper teeth didn’t require more drilling – I’m afraid that might have hit my pain tolerances. As it was, I came out of there with adrenaline shakes from the pain. Went home, and popped me a pill (Hydrocodone 7.5) and ignored it.

Ya know, two teeth make a lot of blood. Four teeth make A LOT of blood. Woke up at 4:30 AM this morning, and my pillow as big o’ blood spots on it (Heabo is gonna kill me!) and some on the sheets (and I looked like a zombie from the movies fresh from a feeding – dried blood all over the side of my face.) Aparently I didn’t clot very well, and continued to bleed in the night. One of the sockets is STILL bleeding as of now, but, seems to be getting better now. I’d probably stay home from work and relax for an extra day, but I’ve got to be at Phillips Pipeline at 10:15 this morning. Bummer.

Well, the alarm clock is going off full-force downstairs now. Need ta go wake up Heabo, before she wakes up on her own, discovers me missing and a pillow covered with blood! Hopefully this will turn out to be a lazy day at work – my visit to Phillips will be a matter of ‘just in case’ and to sell them some more services (they have a piece of fiberoptic cable that’s loosing 48Db of signal. OUCH. And for those that don’t know the Db scale – that doesn’t mean it’s 48 times weaker than normal. Instead, it means that it’s 192 times weaker than normal.) Nothin’ like tellin’ a customer that thier 1/2 mile long fiber run is toast! I’ll probably get to rent a new toy that I’ve never played with before (an OTDR) to run all 12 fibers in the bundle through thier paces. Fun 🙂

Anyway – the real reason I hope things are slow is that I hope to hurry up and get some more programming done on Trajectory, and get a beta released soon. I’m actually way behind schedule now. Kinda to be expected, I suppose, considering everything that’s goin’ on! Time to go start the day…