A FAT FACE

In case my face wasn't round or fat enough before, this week I can honestly say that I have a fat face! Last Tuesday I scheduled a visit to my dentist to have him find the cause of my mouth and gum pain. He checked all my teeth, took x-rays and came to the same conclusion I had sort of come to on my own... I need to have my wisdom teeth extracted. Now, I have to admit here that I'd never had a dental procedure in my whole life, so I was pretty nervous about this whole thing. But I've known for several years that my wisdom teeth were causing problems and have just kept putting off getting them out. My dentist offered to just take the one out that was causing the problem, and in a moment of temporary bravery, I agreed. He wasted no time in getting the needle out and started to numb me up. Not too bad, bearable, ok- this isn't so bad... but wow, my face feels like it's swelling up like a balloon! The the dentist looked at me and a look of "oh, crap" passed over his face. Next thing I know he's calling his assistants, telling them to get ice, then he's apologizing. At this point I'm getting pretty nervous myself, what's going on? He says I have a hematoma and that I am going to really be mad at him for it. By this time I can feel that I am swollen all up around my eye and onto my nose, and my cheek feels like a baseball has been shoved into it. He decides he'd better get the tooth out before I swell up too much for him to get to it, so, about ten seconds later my tooth is out and I'm looking like a freak! I also start to notice that I am shaking like a leaf and wondering why I ever complained about my round face before this. Finally, I get a better explanation of what happened and I start to calm down and feel better about things. The dentist explained that sometimes when he is numbing a patient through the roof of the mouth, he can hit a big vein/vessel which starts to bleed rapidly into the person's cheek and face. Apparently I was unlucky enough to be one of those people. It wouldn't have bothered me so much except that the dentist kept apologizing and telling me I was really going to hate him after this. He said he has special sympathy for patients who have a hematoma because he's had one himself and knows how painful they are. He even wrote a prescription for pain medication and prescribed me enough for a week! That's more than I got when I had my babies!!!

So how is that for a first ever dental procedure? It has been a pretty slow recovery and I have had a good deal of pain. I'm not really excited about having the other three extracted any time soon either! The funny part about all of this though, is that even though this has been an extreme case, it still has not been as terrible as I had built it up to be all these years!