AFGO

Extract:  To draw out; to pull out; to remove forcibly from a fixed position.  (Ed Note:  That is the best definition I've used in a long time).

For some reason my blog - ostensibly about the here and the there of recovery issues - has turned into a screed on my dental problems.  Excuse me - my dental challenges.  An old friend likes the acronym AFGO: Another Doggone Growth Opportunity, roughly.  But I am getting older rather than younger and shit is starting to break.  What can I tell you.  Shit wears out.

My sore tooth - or whatever scraps of tooth material still survived the aborted Root Canal, lurking deep in my dark gums - did not improve overnight.  Deterioration would be a better word.  It hurt to eat, even when I chewed on the other side, and it hurt to drink coffee, which is a crime against humanity, seeing as a large cup of caffeine was just what I needed before a stressful dental appointment.  I've never felt like a lucky guy on the occasions when I had to go to the dentist to get two cavities filled but I was happy to be in the chair at 8AM on a Monday morning.  The decision was to get in to see the Oral Surgeon sooner rather than later.  Fine by me because my mouth hurt.

"What does your week look like?" my fine and excellent cavity-filling but apparently not tooth-pulling dentist said.

Wide open.

"If he can get you in today?  Like - this morning?"

I don't really know what an Oral Surgeon is.  A doctor?  A dentist?  An endodontist?  Periodontist?  A fucking orthodontist?  I heard the word apicoectomy tossed around with a far too casual air, similar to a car mechanic warning me that my Johnson Rod was in poor shape.

The Oral Surgeon was, for a while, my Worst Enemy, before becoming my Best Friend.  That troublesome tooth is in shards and no more for this world.  My mouth feels better with that dude gone than it did with that dude in.  

It was an interesting experience having a tooth pulled.  I was a little more anxious than normal because it was my first tooth extraction - I have a little history with the other stuff, cavities and crowns and root canals and the like, so I know what to expect.  The extraction wasn't painful, exactly, more an exhibition of pulling and wrenching while a nice woman held my head in a fixed position.  And the Oral Surgeon can call out the names of a lot of fancy sounding surgical instruments but it's really not much more than a guy with strong hands using a pliers to pull out a tooth.  A few times he had to kind of twist the tooth shards back and forth while I waited for the sharp Crack! that meant a piece of tooth had succumbed.  

And the blood.  Lots of blood.  I'm sucking on a piece of cotton as I type.