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.

Working the InterWeb

I spent some time scrolling through various InterWeb posts that popped up as a result of my search: Pain After A Root Canal.  I think I should have searched for information on Having Brain Permanently Removed.  Is it possible to live without your brain?  I can see how my life would be less complicated if I didn't have one of those troublesome organs.  My understanding is that it's hard to get along without a brain stem which controls blood pressure and heart rate and internal temperature and other basic maintenance functions but do we really need the other stuff?  In my case it seems to be more of a burden than a blessing.

Yesterday my tooth felt fine.  Today, a little less fine as the day progressed.  This would seem to be as it should be seeing as I had my mouth brutalized not 48 hours ago.  Still, it's more fun to project disaster and the InterWeb didn't disappoint.  One of my favorite commentaries on medical web sites comes from - you guessed it - The Simpson's where one of the characters, fearful that she's having a stroke, finds that one of the surest indicators is a strong fear that you're having a stroke.  Self-fulfilling prophesy indeed.

As I left the swim club today I chatted for a while with a woman who has really been struggling with her teeth.  She showed up wearing braces a while back - at 53 years of age - so I've been inquiring after her health.  It turns out that she and her husband - a teacher - took out a $29,000 loan to pay for this work.  It surely made my problems shrink a bit.

More Thoughts on Prayer

I don't know about this praying thing.  It can be fraught with punji sticks and booby traps and weird, strange shifts of perspective.  I didn't do it for a long time in recovery and I think my spiritual growth suffered.  Then I sort of probed around the fringes of the practice, wary of nasty surprises.  Then I got sort of carried away and filled my Quiet Time with more and more prayers. That leaves me where I am today, wherever that is.

There's a tendency on my part to overthink the purpose of prayer.  There's a tendency on my part to overthink everything.  I overthink the concept of thinking, for chrissake.  Anyway, my perception is that a lot of people believe that if you pray then you can change god's mind about an issue or get him to do something that he wouldn't ordinarily do unless the specific prayer you're offering up reaches god's ears or whatever he uses to hear with.  That seems a little candy machine-esque to me.  Walk up to the god candy machine, make a selection, feed in some money, pull a lever, and out comes your treat.  If you don't put in your coins you don't get a treat but if you put in your coins then you get exactly what you want.

My god isn't short of cash, mister.

I was mixing in a selfless prayer with a selfish request for a specific result aka my Root Canal; namely, that I wanted to avoid a Root Canal.  You know the kind of prayer where you pray for whatever the fuck you want and justify it by tacking on an "if it be thy will" qualifying addendum.  Like god is going to look more favorably on a selfish, self-centered prayer if I pretend like I give a shit what he's thinking.   My mama convinced me it was OK to do this but it has always felt a little dicey, like it's a purchase or a contract or something.  On the other hand, how crappy is the thought that your prayers might just dissipate in the spiritual atmosphere, so much cosmic flotsam and jetsam?  Maybe the praying is for me and me only - maybe it changes me and that's all it does.  It's too weird to think that I can get god to go along with what I want done as long as I offer up a supplication.  Very transactional, don't you think?

So I get in to have my tooth fixed and the cavity is deep enough so that I have to have a Root Canal.  Apparently god decided to go with the "thy will be done" part instead of the "if it would be OK not to have to have a Root Canal that would be great with me" part.  I bet he saw through my naked self-interest in this prayer.  But now I feel like I wasted a lot of time praying.  If I'm not going to get what I want I don't see the point in putting in the effort.

Seriously, I was fine with the outcome.  It was the worst possible outcome but once I got my mind around the procedure it didn't seem that bad.  So I didn't do any praying about the Root Canal before my Root Canal appointment.  My thinking is that I got screwed with a Root Canal so what do I have to pray for?  It's the worst of all possible outcomes.  God can't really do anything for me at this point.  He's lowered the boom.  He's called in his chit.  He hath saith: "Root Canal!!"

Seriously, I left this part of my devotion off my prayer regimen because I wasn't upset about it.  I took my lumps and I didn't feel cursed.

The Root Canal procedure lent a great deal of credence to the power, the force, behind any phrase that ends with "it was like having a Root Canal," as in: "That play was so bad it was like having a etc etc etc."  I was in the chair for a long time.  The Novocaine eliminated the pain but it's still not great having all that drilling done in your mouth which is forced into an unnatural angle by all of the equipment and hands being stuck in there.  

Unfortunately for me the dentist started doing some mumbling under his breath about a crack in the tooth.  It's never good when your medical professional starts mumbling to himself.  Now I think: "Uh-Oh, maybe there's something worse than a Root Canal."  I can't imagine what that would be.  What's worse than a Root Canal?  That seemed to me to be the worst of all outcomes but it's beginning to look like there's something even worse than that.  It hardly seems fair.  I begin to regret the fact that I didn't make a specific supplication to my god concerning the Root Canal.  Remember now that I'm very conflicted about praying for specifics already yet I think that this may be some punishment for something I didn't do.

What a whimsical, cruel god I have today!

At one point I looked at my watch.  The dentist asked if I was good with time.  If I could have spoken I would have said: "Naw, I'm going to walk out of here right now with a mouth full of dental apparatus, you ass."  Actually, I felt like I had been sitting there for a year.

The point is that the tooth is irreparably damaged and has to come out.  One and one half hours of drilling and the dentist can't do a Root Canal.  There is something worse than a Root Canal.

Oral Surgeon:  

Esophageal Varices

Esophageal Varices:  Abnormal, enlarged veins in the tube that connects the throat and stomach (esophagus).  This condition occurs most often in people with serious liver diseases.  Esophageal varices develop when normal blood flow to the liver is blocked by a clot or scar tissue in the liver. To go around the blockages, blood flows into smaller blood vessels that aren't designed to carry large volumes of blood.  The vessels can leak blood or even rupture, causing life-threatening bleeding.

A few months back I had a couple of conversations with a man whose son lives in The Old City.  The son - amazingly enough - was attending a meeting I regularly visited and speaking with a couple of men that I know well.  In my conversations with the dad I was able to vouch for these excellent, excellent guys, easing his mind a bit.

The son was a hard case, having been hospitalized a few times for esophageal bleeding and other complications stemming from his drinking.  He had entered a treatment center but quickly left, objecting to one of their requirements: not working for a while to concentrate solely on recovery His excuse - admirable in intention - was that he owed child support and wanted to keep earning money to pay down his debt.

After another hospitalization his organs failed and he died.  Forty years old.  How important is that money now?  How important is anything that gets in the way of our recovery?

Being a writer I sent the dad the following note:

Writing has been my creative outlet over the years and I've especially enjoyed - or at least learned from - writing about my own recovery.  I think it's pretty hard to bullshit yourself when you're writing to yourself, you know?  What's the point?

So waxing philosophical . . . .

I've been struck by how often I read that pain is unavoidable and that pain is part of life and that pain is just about the only way I grow.  Pain is inevitable - suffering is optional.  I like the line: "Pain is the touchstone of all spiritual growth."  There's a lot of stuff in our Program literature about pain being part of the process.

I read a lot of spiritual stuff and my latest effort is another trip back through the New Testament.  I found this in Romans recently: "We can rejoice, too, when we run into problems and trials for we know that they are good for us - they help us learn to be patient.  And patience develops strength of character and helps us trust God more each time . . . "  I'm sure I would have found something similar if I had been reading in the text of another religion - you mentioned a priest giving the homily at your son's funeral so this passage might be apropos.

I'd also suggest finding a grief group to join.  In the last year I lost my mother and my father and Ken H, my sponsor of 25 years, a man who was more important in my life than my own dad.  I started going to a grief group loosely run by one of the pastors and a retired psychologist at this hippy-dippy non-denominational church that is the site of my 7AM morning meeting.  I've learned so much about loss.  That there is no right way or wrong way to grieve; that it takes whatever time it takes to get through the worst of it - there's no set time frame to adhere to; that grief can come from all kinds of places - there are people there who have lost parents and spouses and children, who are getting divorced or have recently retired, who have lost pets; that grief can express itself in depression or anxiety or guilt or anger, and sometimes in all of these and in no particular order.  With some of the folks I roll my eyes and think "you should be over this" and with some of them I don't know how they get out of bed in the morning and all stages in between.

And there's nothing worse than having someone not in the middle of a problem suggesting ways to get through a problem.  If there's something that resonates here - great.  If not, please take it in the spirit in which it was given.

Hey, I had two crowns done Monday and I have a 1PM root canal appt tomorrow.  That make you feel any better?

Humble-Brag

Humblebrag: Subtly letting others know about how fantastic your life is while undercutting it with a bit of self-effacing humor.  E.g., "Just ate about fifteen pieces of chocolate - gotta learn to control myself when flying first class or they'll cancel my modelling contract."

I don't mention the length of my sobriety very often in meetings.  I don't want to be part of that group of people who manage to work in what they see as impressive parts of their personal story every time they talk: how long they've been sober or how many people they supervise or how much money they made in their heyday.  Sometimes I think it serves a point because it can be an example of how our struggle to grow is never-ending.  We get better at things - we don't often get done with things.

I share this dentist-related update.

After the whole shitload of bad news I got during my first visit to my new dentist I immediately took the stance that this guy is a lying, thieving, conniving, money-grubbing piece of shit who is trying to screw me out of every dime that I have.  There is, of course, no factual evidence to support this.  It is, you see, a perfect example of blaming someone else for problems that are usually of my own making.  It's like complaining about the cop who gives you the speeding ticket. The problem is the speeding but it's a lot easier to bitch about the cop because it transfers the result of my lousy behavior onto someone else.  Very popular with alcoholics.

Because I believe I'm in a Solution-based Program - not a Problem-based Program - I go into my solution stance.  In this case I recite drone-like that I have a good dentist and that I have the money to do the work.  After about a day I no longer hate the dentist although I suspect his motives still.  And I'm upset, which seems fair as the work is going to involve a lot of needles being stuck into my gums, and not for free, let me tell you what.

I continue my mantra and after a few more days I'm at peace with the situation.  Still nervous but not on the offensive.  I'm encouraged that the first appointment doesn't lead to the worst-case scenario, and this helps calm my mind about future possibilities.  So I'm not as upset when the second appointment does show more extensive damage.  I was all worked up for appointment one, and for no good reason, and not at all worked up for appointment two, and bad shit happened, and I don't really care.

My opening gambit was not to do any of the work and to get a second opinion to booth just so I could show this guy how little trust I had in him.  Slowly I decided to fix the most egregious damage but not address a tooth more.  Then I'm going to do some more of the work, then I'm going to fix every fucking tooth that shows the slightest hint of decay.

It's why we go to the dentist, right?  To have damaged teeth repaired.  Why go if I'm going to refuse to do anything the dentist says to do?  It just makes no sense.

So the point is this: almost 30 years of sobriety and I still suffer unnecessarily.  I know intellectually what is what but the emotional reaction can still be guttural, forceful, unmoored to reality.  I still have to step through.

The Flaming Squirrel Cage

There's a story in our text about a man who stops by a restaurant for lunch and decides at some point that he could have a shot of whiskey as long as he put it in a glass of milk.  He tries this a few times during one luncheon with sterling results until he drinks a lot more and wakes up in Peoria, IL, unsure as to how he got there.  I know the question that's on everyone's mind: why the hell would anyone ruin a good glass of whiskey by mixing it with the vile fluid that comes from the teats of a mama cow?  I tried literally every drink known to man but I never mixed a perfectly good liquor with milk.  Bleech.

I used to do medicinal LSD so I'm not qualified to comment in depth on this story.

One of the most popular images of the morning meeting the last few weeks has been The Flaming Squirrel Cage.  It's pretty common to have someone talk about getting on the treadmill or into the hamster cage, but a guy adding the flaming part has really struck a cord.  I can just see myself, hung-over, beat to shit, still singed from a long day in The Flaming Squirrel Cage, getting up and walking dejectedly over to the smoldering contraption, ladling a goodly amount of gasoline all over it, lighting a match and then climbing in, one more time, one more time.

There was a woman attending her first meeting today.  She was overdressed.  I'm guessing she expected a different crowd than the one she got.  I still say the bravest thing I ever did, the hardest thing, was walking into my first meeting.

The Process

Process:  A series of events which produce a result.

More Grief Group stuff  . . . 

I'm glad I'm going to this group.  It has made me realize that grief takes all shapes and forms, and that grief doesn't have a set of procedures that take a certain amount of time and progress a standard way.  I see from my grief mates that there are all kinds of triggers and intensities and durations, and they're all good and normal and just really fine and OK, unless they're not, and that may take a while to figure out, or longer than that.  I see that there is a tendency for most of us to think: "I'm doing this wrong because I'm not where I should be at this point."

As in most areas of my life I'm incredibly glad that I have The Fellowship especially, in this grief arena, the fellowship part of The Fellowship.  I can't emphasize enough how often I think when someone is sharing in the Grief Group: "This poor woman doesn't have anyone to talk to about this stuff outside of a paid professional."  It makes me grateful that I have the Program part - the Steps - and that I also have the Fellowship part - the people.  I'm confident that I could get and stay sober on a remote atoll if I diligently worked The Steps but it sure enough is nice having people to bounce my weirdness off of.

I am reminded in so many areas of my life how effective the trudging part of anything can be.  I know I talk about The Process where I dutifully try to do all of the things that I know are good for me and then trust that, in the long run, everything is going to work out well.  It's frustrating when you're in the shit, though.  I get that, too.  There's nothing more frustrating than being in the shit and having some joker tell you that everything is going to be OK in the long run.

One of the women in the Grief Group is going through a divorce - after 25 years of marriage - that was initiated by her husband who, of course, has a new girlfriend already.  This woman is pissed.  I get that, too.  I'm also grateful for a program that constantly forces me back into the self-analytical, introspective part of things.  While I get to stand on my own two feet as a child of god, not groveling or sniveling in front of anyone, I'm still expected to do most of my sweeping on my side of the street.  You can have ten feet of rubble and detritus on your side of the street and it's none of my business, assuming of course it isn't blocking my driveway.  Then I need to speak up.

I am reminded of the suggestion that my best prayers are always ones that have others in mind and that they always include the crucial phrase "If it be thy will."  Or "If it be your will" if you want to stay away from Ye Olde English.  I think I can pray for specific things as long as I add that qualifier.  "I'd like my estranged husband to contract flesh-eating disease, if it be thy will." That kind of thing.

I'm glad to say that I think my most important contribution in the group is to be an ass in a seat so that some of these folks have an audience.