Good Drills, Bad Drills

Oh, I do love hardware, almost as much as I love camping supplies. Be it hereby known that I am now the proud owner of:

• A Craftsman ratcheting socket wrench set with nine metal fittings in an array of sizes up to one inch. Josh suggested to Molly who suggested to me that I try such a tool to loosen that stubborn, giant bolt holding together my old bed. Wonder of wonders, it worked like magic.

• Thirty DeWalt power drill screwdriver bits in a variety of sizes and types: slotted, Philips, torx, and square—plus a 3/8” bit tip holder! I have dozens of Philips head screws to remove and this should speed the process.

The new bed that’s due here tomorrow is generic and lacking in character, but its price was right. It’ll be very sad to bid farewell to the pretty cherry-wood bed canopy one I’ve slept in since I was six. It has personality, and no doubt a storied past.

The slats that hold the canopy in place still have the glow-in-the-dark stars from my early childhood. I remember being so little that I had to stand on my tippy-toes and reach as high as I could to adhere the luminescent yellow-green decals of moons, Saturns, and meteors. Every night their glow comforted me as I drifted off to sleep.

This bed has been witness to my earliest childhood dreams as well as to my current full-blown nightmares. It’s hosted pre-adolescent sleepovers, overnight stays with significant others, and cuddling sessions with grandchildren. And just think of all the people since the 1850s, 100 years before me—all with their tales—who rested there. Back then, its mattress was stuffed with horse hair and laid over a network of criss-crossing ropes anchored to a series of wooden pegs on the side.

Retiring this bed means retiring its 150-year history. Does any of you want it for your own? Trouble is, it’s hard to put together, not in great shape, and squeaky. For now I’ll just be shlepping its big pieces down into my basement. I find it hard to sacrifice sentiment for safety.

9:00 a.m.

After today’s oral surgery I don’t know what shape I’ll be in for wrangling the beds, but we’ll see. This is what lies ahead in the mouth department in an hour: Step Three of about ten:

Molly is picking me up shortly to drive me to my 10:00 a.m. fate. For anxiety, the periodontist had prescribed me Ativan: one before bed last night and one this morning before the appointment. Man, has it zonked me. My brain is fuzzy, I wobble when I walk, and my typing fingers are flying across the keyboard like an electrocuted spider, hitting random keys instead of the intended ones. 

Update: on the way to the doctor, I saw many people walking down the street. In fact, I saw twice as many as there actually were, plus a woman with four arms and two men with two heads each. I can see why I’m forbidden to drive.

2:00 p.m.

It is done. It was awful. It began with at least a dozen novocaine injections into some of the more tender and sensitive locations in my poor little mouth. With that, my entire body suddenly began shaking uncontrollably: teeth chattering, legs and arms dancing. I’m pretty sure that was a result of the blast of medicine. It toned down eventually.

This horrific portrait set the mood for the procedure, staring me down all the while (not my most flattering look):

While no part of the process was pleasant, the worst was when the 1.5-inch-long, 1/8″-diameter drill worked its way slowly, in fits and starts, over and over, through gum and deep into my jaw, requiring a great deal of manual pressure to get through the bone. At first I didn’t utter a word of complaint, but during one prolonged and forceful drill-a-thon, eventually I asked, “Is it supposed to hurt?” It’s not. She shot me with more novocaine, after which I didn’t complain again because I didn’t want to be a whiner, though it was still sharply painful. Fortunately, the doctor noticed me silently squeezing my eyes shut in response to a particularly powerful thrust of the metal bit, and realized the numbing agent wasn’t fully working. By then she’d approached the maximum dosage, but shot one final syringe directly into a nerve inside my cheek, sending electric zaps crackling across my face. I felt hardly a thing after that.

At one point the assistant accidentally sprayed the back of my throat with a stream of water, which made me choke just as the drill became fully embedded. The doc whispered urgently that she couldn’t remove the bit just then, so I tried to suppress coughing and that drowning feeling until my mouth was my own again.

Three hours later I proudly sported three deep mouth-holes with metal fittings inserted, a bone graft, four stitches and a molar that had been deeply excavated below its gum line on all sides.

Molly picked me up from the doctor’s, drove me by CVS for antibiotics, and safely deposited me home, where the novocaine quickly started to wear off.

I am not terribly happy. I’m on an alternating schedule of Tylenol and Motrin, which is sort of like putting a bandaid on an amputation. Oh, okay: so that’s a bit melodramatic. And the truth of it is that I’m pretty tough. Plus, people have these procedures every day. The only exceptional aspect of my treatment is that the doc did far more than usual in a single sitting.

5:30 p.m

I’m now distracting myself by drinking cooling fruit smoothies. Solid food won’t be in my future for a while yet. My whole head hurts, and even my eyes. Soon after returning home I indulged in something I never do: took a short nap. At its end, the doorbell rang and I found these on my front porch. They’re from generous and thoughtful Small, they’re beautiful, they smell good, and I love them. Now you can stop worrying, Small!

Remember I told you how much I love hardware? I should have been more specific. I like only the kind that’s on the exterior of my body. My tongue keeps fiddling with all these alien appliances. I don’t like them. Even when I had hardware put into my foot after a fracture, I asked the doc to remove it when the bone was healed, because I couldn’t stand the feeling of the screw heads bumping through my skin. Afterwards I presented the salvaged titanium to a jewelry-making friend who transformed it into a necklace and earrings.

I must say that, though there is more of the same in my not-too-distant future, at least today is over! Goodnight!