extracting the tooth

You ever wake up in the morning, look around and think, "This is my life? What the hell happened?"

On Thursday -- not last Thursday, mind, but the Thursday before the Thursday before the Thursday before the Thursday before that -- the boyfriend finally had his wisdom teeth out. Just two of them, since only two were causing him trouble. I suppose that means that at some future date he'll have to go through the entire painful process all over again. The appointment was set for first thing in the morning, which meant that I had to take the morning off from work. "If possible, have someone stay with the patient for the first four hours after the procedure." Apparently, this was because some patients can have belated poor reactions to anaesthesia.

All set up in my hero complex, I imagined myself performing CPR on a lifeless Guy-corpse and dialing 911. (It took a few days for the teeth marks to fade on the Guy's arm. He's still a little puzzled about what brought on that particular attack of the munchies.) At 8 am that morning, I drove him down to the dentist's office in Pi-man, sent him off into surgery with a kiss, and settled down in the waiting room to play with the Gameboy.

I've been battling Castlevania on that sucker for a while now, having initiated a deep and mutually dependent relationship during my long plane flight back from New York. My personal opinion is that somewhere in the Gameboy manual there should be a clearly worded notice to consumers: "WARNING. You will look like a nincompoop while playing." Engaged in jumping and swatting and swinging and annihilating bad guys of all description, I neglected to notice that the buttons on the controller had a direct electrical connection to that part of my brain that controls personal dignity. It wasn't until I actually kneed my neighbor in the ribs that I realized I'd been obsessively twitching with every jerk of my thumbs. Somewhere out there there is a plane's worth of people that think I suffer from Tourette's Syndrome.

Hell, as long as they don't think I was some sort of terrorist.

I had this brilliant idea that next time I went on a plane trip I would paint the Gameboy a nice black color, then put a shutter of some sort over the screen. Given a little pocket taperecorder that occasionally sent out beeping sounds, and a flight uniform rental at a costume shop, I could probably manage to convince my next seat neighbor that I was controlling the plane from the cabin.

"Part of our new security measures, sir. We've transferred the cockpit to an undisclosed portion of the passenger cabin, and run the plane controls via a wireless hook-up. Sorry about the turbulence. I think the stewardesses are using the microwave. Boy, I hope nobody's left a cell phone on."

So, okay, this is a bit of a tangent. At any rate, I took the Guy to the dentist, they took out two of his wisdom teeth, and right about the time I got bored with the game and started reading a fascinating magazine article about President Bush (Sr.) and his belief in the honesty of the energy industry, one of the nurses came out to inform me that he was finished.

"Did he die?" I asked, because I felt obligated to ask.

She looked mildly offended. "No."

"Told him so," I said with satisfaction.

She led me through the hallways to the recovery room, giving me a short synopsis of the procedure en route. "He's a feisty one," she added as a side comment, steering me past a chamber of horrors where a white-faced girl was staring at the ceiling. "He's already asking questions and wanting to know what everything is."

"You should have used stronger drugs."

We'd made our way to a large room with those rolling gurney-beds that clinics like so much. She drew back a curtain that closed off a section of the room, and voila, there was the Guy, looking like a stuffed chipmunk with a big white bandage around his head.

He was beeping.

"He's a little bit out of it," the nurse informed me. He looked it. There was a little alligator-clip thing attached to the end of his finger, which was the source of the beeping: a heart monitor set up next to the bed.

The Guy pried open an eye to peer at me. "Unha aa uu eh?"

"Like my old dwarf hamster," I announced, and took a seat by his bed, carefully arranging my expression into one of deep and concerned sympathy.

"Uhn," the Guy said firmly. The nurse proceeded to give me a demonstration on how to change the bandages in his mouth, talking over a constant stream of questions and random comments from the thoroughly drugged-up patient. Whatever they'd knocked him out with, it was some good stuff.

"This is a good time to ask him questions he wouldn't tell you normally," she advised me, after I discovered a darker, uglier side of my personality that actually found Drugged-Up Guy very, very funny. "He won't even remember the question in the morning."

"Do I dedt do deeb by dees?" the Guy asked again for the fourth time.

The nurse pottered away to tend to some other victim of oral torture; I held the Guy's hand. He looked very small and sad under the sheets with his face wrapped up in white gauze. With his face wrapped up again, he'd lost the impetus to talk. Imagining that he was dozing, I spared a second to look around the room.

When I looked back, I discovered him very stealthily coaxing the alligator clip off of his finger. The beeping abruptly keened: FLATLINE! FLATLINE!

The nurse came skidding around the corner.

The Guy hastily closed his eyes and pretended to be sleeping while the nurse fiddled with the Beep Machine. "It's a touchy thing," she explained to me, apparently to assauge any fears I might have had that my boyfriend had, in fact, temporarily died. "Any little interruption in the beat makes it panic, and most people don't have completely regular pulses in their fingers. No worries."

"No worries," I agreed dryly. "You should have used stronger drugs."

I drove him home. The pamphlet they handed me informed me that I should stay with him for the next four hours to monitor his progress. I should change his dressings every thirty minutes. I should pick up his prescription for vicodin. I should use the little Capri-Sun knock-off bag given me and feed him water or fruit juice. I should vaseline his lips to make sure they didn't get chapped.

He was chipper enough by the end of four hours to sit up and watch television. Me, I was required back at work, the Big Purple Brother. I sat down next to him on the couch and gingerly kissed his cheek. "I'm sorry I have to go," I said apologetically. "I'll take care of you when I get home. It'll only be a few hours."

"Unh," said the Guy, happily, and squirted apple juice into his mouth.

The best laid plans of mice and men...

...I came home with mono.