They decided to do the extraction with local anesthetic instead of putting me under. The x-rays implied that it would be a simple procedure, with both teeth having only one root and growing upwards out of the gums. I totally understand why they used local. Unfortunately, the x-rays were hiding something sinister.

The tooth on my left side had not one root, like a normal wisdom tooth, but three. The right side was even worse, with a corkscrew root. The dentist literally had to untwist it from my jaw. I’m sure this isn’t totally uncommon, but it was certainly not the easy, mess free procedure predicted.

Here’s where I start to question my dentist’s practice. Apparently, I wasn’t in need of prescription painkillers.

“Do you have a prescription I need to fill?” I asked.

“No,” said the kind dental assistant. “Just go buy some Ibuprofen and Tylenol and take it together.”

After recovering from two wisdom teeth extractions with only Ibuprofen, I no longer fear death, or childbirth, or loss, or pain. I welcome it with gritted teeth and a piercing stare. I can endure.

I don’t know what it was, but I suspect that the combination of a million Ibuprofen and Tylenol in a stomach of pure chicken broth and pudding led me to puke so much that night. I puked once an hour, every hour between 2am and noon the next day. When asked about it, the dental assistant said I must have had the flu. Funny, though, I developed no other symptoms.

And that’s how I spent my Valentines Day.

On the bright side, my left socket healed freakishly fast. When I went for a check up between pukes, the dental assistant said that it looked like a week of recovery after one day. There’s still a gaping hole on the right side of my face, and I hope that whatever the hell I can in it is, as the dentist said, part of the healing process. He didn’t look at it, though. He just had me describe it to him on the phone. Should I trust him?