Ouchtown, Population: me

Last week was very painful. How I managed to get any work done during that time is unbelievable.

After the boys went home after their weekend, I was eating some of Ethan’s leftover chips while watching the Walking Dead when it happened. Just a single one of those chips broke one of my teeth in half. Like over half of my tooth fell out immediately, and that was the start of my pains that week.

So a tiny bit of background before I continue: I hate dentists. I loathe them all with every fibre of my being. I had a very brutal childhood experience with a bad dentist and the rest of the industry has suffered my wrath every since. The last time I visited a dentist was over a decade ago, and when that happen I was shaking so much that they actually offered to put me under. I was that terrified.

So skip back to the future, kind of since this is now a week ago. I have broken a tooth, and a visit to the dentist is now inevitable. I have coverage so money isn’t an issue, I just had to bite the bullet (excuse the pun) and book an emergency appointment. Thankfully, an office only walking distance from my place had an opening the next day (Monday) and I was seen very quickly. I was given some pretty strong meds, and a date for extraction. I wasn’t in a lot of pain, just upset that I had to go through this again.

On Wednesday, I had the tooth removed. Like I said before I was shaking like a leaf the time before… but this time there was no shaking. I was calm, my hands were steady and there was a lot more self control. The only thing that hurt was the needle to numb down the area and that only lasted a few seconds. Moments later, the tooth was out and I was done.

So what’s changed in the last decade? Obviously my condition. Since my last visit, I had been diagnosed with my chronic autoimmune disease. I’ve been living with a lot of pain years before I was diagnosed. I like to think I’ve been managing my pain decently, but I never realized how decent that was until I went back to the dentist. It was the exact opposite of the last time I had been to a dentist. I was like a statue, never making a sound and just waiting for the man to yank the tooth already. Don’t get me wrong, it did hurt… it just didn’t bother me as much as it did last time.

This isn’t the first time I’ve noticed this either. Ten years ago, people would have laughed if I even suggested getting a small tattoo. A lot of my friends know how much I didn’t like needles and thought I would never do it. And yet on the month of my 41st birthday, I got two of them, and didn’t even shed a single tear. And these were not small tattoos either, as each of them took over five hours a each to ink. It appears that since I’ve been dealing with so much pain because of my Ankylosing Spondylitis, the things that used to make me cower don’t even make me blink anymore. Like those tattoos, I handled the dentist with ease and with this meh attitude. I even booked a check up for three months from now!

Despite all this, I still managed to finish some comic scripts, and even few chapters of the online serial books. No one is more surprised about this than me, cause I used to be a very big wuss. The old me would have moped and used this excuse to stay in bed all week. Today I’m back to work and not even missing a single day with the boys.  I was given a prescription of like 20 super strong pain meds, and in the week and a half since this tooth broke happened, I’ve only used two. That’s it.  I didn’t even take any the day the tooth was pulled when the Novocaine wore off. I understood that I was getting a little tougher since the AS came into my life, but this was unbelievable. I didn’t even shed a single tear.

Like I said, no one is more surprised than I am. It eventually had to happen, but it appears I am growing up just a tiny bit. Like Bob said: these times. they are a changing…

Cheers,

Peter