Oh, you guys, I am just back from the dentist and YIKES it was a rough visit.
I've mentioned before that I have that redhead mutation that makes me resistant to the -caine family of drugs. I need a bigger dose to get numb and I seem to metabolize them faster than most people. I mentioned it to my dentist and he told me he'd pull out the big guns.
Alas, fifteen minutes later I told him I could feel him drilling. "It's not bad, though," I told him. I could feel a little more of the next pass, and then a couple of passes after that he made me jump involuntarily. He stopped to give me another shot. It helped a little, but I could still feel the drill intermittently.
My tooth had cracked around an old filling, and he had to drill it out to replace it. I didn't know how big it was, but it seemed to go on for a long time. The unpredictable nature of the pain made it harder to handle: with a labor contraction, you know approximately when it's coming and approximately how long it will last. Not so with the drill. I was too distressed to pray the rosary, and this is coming from a person who prays the rosary during transition contractions. Instead I prayed like this: Jesus? Jesus! Jesus!! Jesus? etc. It helped more than you might think, but the dentist was talking about his gardens and his bees and I couldn't really focus. (I should have told him I was trying to pray -- he's a Christian himself.)
Instead I found myself thinking about cranial nerves: "Okay. He must have hit IX and V both pretty hard. Maybe that's why you're feeling gaggy, because your numbed-up uvula is flopping on the side of your posterior pharyngeal wall that still has sensation? Except, wait, motor innervation of the uvula is X, isn't it? and X isn't out, is it?"
I am not sure that I was thinking accurately about cranial nerves, but it was comforting nonetheless. It was all the more so when I lurched into the bathroom afterward, resolved that I would get out of that office without crying or puking but not exactly sure how I would manage it, and wondered what in the world was the matter with my eye. He hadn't given me a shot in my eye, for Pete's sake. I was grateful to recall that V is the trigeminal nerve, with a branch that does indeed run up to the eye. The Wikipedia picture makes me wonder if I have a mutant CN V anatomy to accompany my mutant I-scoff-at-your-local-anesthetic trait, because I'm not sure how he could hit that top branch with a shot to my upper gum.
Even as I finish writing this post I am feeling better, an advantage of metabolizing those drugs rapidly. Glad that's over -- that's really all I have to say.
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