I like solid food. I don’t want to have to go through that again. The pain was unbearable; it was like nails digging into my jaws. I was so nervous to get my wisdom teeth removed. I had heard stories about people getting theirs taken out. They’d tell me, “It was the worst pain I’ve ever felt.” Another story I heard reported that I won’t be able to eat solid food for about two weeks. A couple days before the operation, Dr. Warruez called my parents and reassured them, “He’ll be put out like a sleeping bear. He won’t feel anything.” After knowing this I felt so relieved that I wouldn’t be awake to see them take my wisdom teeth out. The night before I went to get my wisdom teeth taken out, the dentist called and declared, “You are not going to be put out for the operation. You will only be on nitrous oxide.” I started to get nervous and feel fear.

The day of the operation, I walked in with a straight face, trying not to look even a bit of nervous. I sat in the waiting room. I waited for a good fifteen minutes before I heard, “Douglas Church, we are ready for you!” As I headed back to the operation room, I was looking at the paintings on the walls of skies, oceans, and animals, which calmed me down a little.

I walked nervously into the room where I was going to be for the next hour or two, and the dentist told me to take a seat. It was a female dental assistant at first who asked, “Are you comfortable.” I replied, “No, I’m not.” She chuckled like a hyena. Then she started checking out my mouth, and I felt a massive pinch in each of my jaws. It felt like I stabbed my gums with a toothpick, and first my tongue started going numb. Then I lost feeling in my jaw. Dr. Warruez walked in and put this rebreather (a mask) and told me to start taking heavy breaths.  The last thing I remember seeing is the doctor putting a scalpel in my mouth; then I fell asleep. My dad had said after the operation, “We paid $1,800 and you weren’t even knocked out.”

When I woke up, I saw Dr. Warruez stitching my gums together, and when Warruez was done stitching up my gums, the lady assistant put gauze in my mouth help stop the bleeding. After I stood up, I took it out of my mouth and handed it back to the assistant. After the operation my mom took me to the pharmacy, and I felt unusually upset because I wanted to go into the Halloween store while she was in the pharmacy getting my pain meds. When my mom and I arrived home, I had some pain in my mouth, so I slept. When I woke, up I took my pain medication and did one salt water rinse out, and I could feel all the pain in my jaws just ease for a moment. 

A couple days after the surgery after doing salt-water rinses, I started tasting an obscurely nasty and foul taste in my mouth; my mom took me to another dentist because the dentist who did the surgery couldn’t figure out why my mouth was still hurting. The new dentist figured it out. He exclaimed, “Yeah, you have an infection.” He told me that food was caught in the wound and caused an infection.

The new dentist prescribed me penicillin to rid my jaw of the infection. After three weeks I could finally start to eat normally again, but I still feel a faint pain when I chew on hard food. In the future when people tell me they’re going to have their wisdom teeth taken out, I’m going to laugh and say, “It sucks.”