Thursday, January 01, 2004

It appears that my recent entries have been quite terrible. I feel I'm quite losing it. Perhaps I'm just lazy - holidays do that to people, as I've realised. Anyway, this entry is going to be an extremely long one. Quite interesting actually, since I was toying around with a rather weird method of writing (a rather poor imitation of one of my genius friends' style, but still a joy to try out). Terribly verbose. Nothing much more I can say, except that I'm sorry if you find it a torture to read.

Enjoy.

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He seemed to be walking in an empty MRT station, or an MRT. All he could remember was that it was a place of gleaming sterile steel and dark glass panes, and the silence. He sat down, and somehow his friends were sitting there beside him, where there was only emptiness a moment ago. And so he talked to them merrily. Yet he felt that something was pulling him away, and his friends' voices began to fade into the distance. Someone was standing beside him - a tall woman cloaked in darkness. A long pale hand stretched from that terrible figure towards his face, and he saw that it held some kind of rod. She said something and pain blossomed in his jaw, coruscating down nerve endings in a furious flood...

As he floated then in the murky unknown between worlds, thoughts befuddled and the clear memories of his dream slipping from him like scattered wisps, all he felt was the persistence of that terrible pain, and he was reminded of that woman. He sought to place the familiarity he felt, and with a sudden realization he knew that he had been reading too much Harry Potter before bed. He smiled, shaking his head. He had had weird dreams before, but one of Bellatrix Lestrange putting a Cruciatus curse on him was quite absurd.

He was jerked suddenly out of his reverie by another burst of pain from his jaw, and he realised that that was surely not a figment of his imagination. Dratted thing had been hurting for three days and going, and if it continued its relentless assault on his senses - there was only so much Anarex could do - he was going to have to do something about it. He had more than a sneaking feeling that it was a wisdom tooth, and he would have to get it removed. No use hoping that the pain would disappear miraculously as it had done before. This was serious. He could feel that it was already infected - the lymph nodes in his neck were quite swollen and painful.

So much for traditional remedies. "You're just heaty," pronounced his aunt sagely before prescribing some ginseng tea. That certainly did nothing to ease that pounding ache, nor did the bittergourd and barley. Another wave arose from his jaw and he cringed. He could feel his pulse echoed in the relentless throbbing of his jaw, and he peeled open eyes clouded with sleep to stare into darkness, the faint outlines of his pillow coming into focus. He peered near-sightedly at the clock but could see nothing in the darkness - his mother had switched off the nightlight. It must be some time after four. The cuckoo clock in the living room helpfully began its faithful half-hourly report at this time, and told him that it was five in the morning.

Slumping back into his bed, he tried to return to slumber but the pain continued to defeat his efforts. Wave after wave after wave after... He did not know when he finally slipped back into tortured sleep.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

He stood with his eyes closed - screwed tight, actually - as the X-ray machine began to whirr and he could see a bright light moving across his field of vision through the dark curtains that were his eyelids. His teeth were clamped on the removable L-shaped piece of plastic that was separated from his teeth by a small plastic bag, that was now rustling like something was brushing against it in its movement. He wondered how long it would take, while the lights and abominable humming continued. His legs began to tremble ever so slightly, and that movement translated itself into a slight sideways movement of his head against the cushions clasping his temples on either side. Remembering that the lady had said to keep very still, he wondered whether the trembling would affect the X-ray. Oh bother.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

He stared out of the window, watching the minuscule motes that were probably floating around his cornea superimposed on that blue-gray sky drift around randomly, and he wondered about Brownian motion. The large round clock on the wall in front of him, with its generic white face and black markings and hands, told him that about five minutes had passed since the injection, and he could feel the anaesthetic spread along what he thought must be his right inferior alveolar nerve and numbing his right lower jaw, such that the pain that had troubled him for days was now somewhat removed, although he could still feel its presence, the way a person's silhouette is seen through a curtain and yet the person's features can't be seen.

He was quite bored. He knew that the doctor wouldn't be back for some time since she had to wait for the anaesthetic to take full effect, and so his eyes wandered around the cozy little operatory, which was adorned on three walls with grey formica counters as well as cupboards that stored a wide variety of dental instruments, he was sure. He looked at the trigeminal nerve chart on the wall to his right, but could not see much since the words were quite tiny. His eyes then alighted on the the vast array of gleaming sterile instruments in front of him, and he wondered how the dentist could walk out and be sure that he would not play with the instruments. He felt quite tempted to fiddle around with the black nozzles that he felt were quite surely used to emit a jet of water into a patient's mouth, but he curbed that temptation.

He looked out of the window again, watching those particles float around in their endless motion.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In the end, it was over quite quickly. After a curt command to her assistant to watch closely, the dentist inserted a few wads of gauze between the offending tooth and his cheek, and picked up a steel instrument that he thought must be some kind of scalpel, making some quick cuts in his mouth with it. A flurry of replacing the blood-soaked gauze with fresh wads. The dentist picked up that large clamp and pulled his mouth open wider with a gloved hand while the other guided that instrument into his mouth and positioned it to get a good grip on the tooth. The assistant was dutifully sucking all the blood up with the rubber tube she was holding.

He wished he were able to see what was now going on in his mouth, sure that it must be quite fascinating, and was irritated that he could only guess. Some part of his mind muttered that this must be why doctors hate being patients. Ah well.

His field of vision was now filled with the dentist's as well as her assistant's faces, with the bright overhead lamp between the two heads. He felt the scrape of the clamp against his tooth as the dentist sought to gain purchase on the blood-slippery tooth. She pulled - nothing. She tried again, this time twisting her arm to get better leverage, and he realised that he was so caught up in the moment that he had forgotten to keep his mouth wide open. That gloved hand was pulling almost painfully on his right cheek, and he stretched his mouth wide. He prayed the the tooth would not fracture, that it would be a simple extraction. He felt the clamp take position, felt the dentist brace her arm and pull, and he felt something give way. A glimpse of a metallic shadow, and a clinking of something deposited on the tray. Another flurry of gauze wads inserted and removed, and another.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

As he left the operatory, biting hard on that wad of gauze now lodged in the recesses of his right lower jaw, his mouth filled with the metallic tang of blood and the bitter antiseptic aroma of the gauze, his right cheek numb with the memory of gloved fingers, he gazed upon the tray and glimpsed, among the scattered instruments and brilliantly red gauze wads, the gleaming curves of a tooth. Amid the blood that stained it bits of white peeked out at him, and he marvelled at the tooth's symmetrical beauty. If only he could take it home with him... He knew, though, that the memory was quite sufficient.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

He lay dreaming again, and he dreamt that his mother had given him a dumpling. Unwrapping it, he took a bite and talked to someone through a mouthful of glutinous rice and meat chunks. Suddenly, he gasped - he had bitten on a piece of meat with a wisdom tooth that was no longer there, and the memory of pain jarred him from groggy sleep to realise that the gauze had dislodged itself from his jaw and now lay, a limp wet glob, against his tongue, and was about to roll into his throat. A frenzy of movement saved him from choking and replaced the gauze.

As he removed the piece of gauze, stained a red so dark it was nearly black, he peered into the mirror at the dark recesses of his jaw and believed the bleeding had stopped. Quite relieved, he threw the gauze away and massaged his right masseter, cramped from all that biting on gauze.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It felt weird, now that the tooth was gone. There was a bizarre emptiness behind his second lower right molar, only tender gum where the adamant enamel of a tooth had once been. He thought of that tooth, still.

~~~~~~END~~~~~~~

Avaris / 1/01/2004 03:08:00 PM

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