From: li@Data-IO.COM (Phyllis Rostykus)
Subject: Re: Whee....
Organization: Data I/O Corporation
Date: Thu, 24 Dec 1992 00:41:06 GMT

In article <1992Dec23.165115.24366@wam.umd.edu> amanda@wam.umd.edu (Me again) writes:
>Amanda staggers into the Place looking rather disoriented.  "This is the 
>Amanda without the Ekho, by the way... is there any way to tell us apart?"

"Lots." says Liralen, "You don't look *that* much alike, and you two act
real differently, I think..."

>She walks up to the bar and orders... "A chocolate milkshake.  With a spoon.
>Straws, so they tell me, will reopen the wounds...

"Yup."  Liralen winces as she realizes why.  "mJohn, though, had as his
dinner, the night after he got his wisdom teeth out, a taco, blended and
through a straw."  She wrinkles her nose at the thought.

>"See, i just had my wisdom teeth out... all four!  One was sideways.  The
>stitches get removed in a week.  In the meantime, i'm wandering around my
>world in a Percodan haze, with chipmunk cheeks...."

She nods and grins.  Her too, a long while back.  Another co-worker had
theirs out two days ago.

>The Percodan doesn't last nearly as long as it needs to.  "Time for some
>Nuprin..."

She laughs softly, "I thought it lasted too long when I had mine out.  I
hate that fuzzy feeling, would rather deal with the honest pain and not
find myself all frustrated and disoriented and without my balance or
reflexes, but different things for different people.  One thing that helped
me a lot was drinking ice water with plenty of crushed ice for me to hold
in my cheeks, and having ice packs along my jaw.  Helped both the swelling
and the pain."

Liralen echo's the Boss Troll's sentiments about mouth surgery.  "No fun at
all.  One of the things that always gets me to flinch.  But then the last
time I had some was when myJohn had accidentally broken one of my front
teeth (two other friends and I were holding him down to tickle him
properly, when John reacted somewhat wildly and bashed the back of his
head into my mouth.  His head was fine.  My tooth broke.  I now have free
licence to call him hard headed.) and I had had to have a root canal.

"While having the root canal the dentist was trying to work through a
filling in another patient and novicaine seems to be one of those things
that my body metabolizes *quickly*.  Plus, when trying to novicaine the
patient in the cubicle next to mine, that patient got *REALLY* violent,
and threw the dentist against the partition between the cubicles.  So,
while feeling the numbness wearing off and *knowing* that the nerve was
raw and open to the air, I suddenly ended up with dentist instruments all
over me, a wall falling onto me and a dentist looking up at me from the
floor while that other patient stormed off, swearing a blue streak.

"I had looked at the dentist, the dentist had looked up at me.  One of the
lenses in his glasses had cracked.  He had then said, 'How are you
doing?'  I considered the question very carefully, and then cracked up,
which started the dentist to laughing shakily.  We ended up laughing so
hard we were crying.

"The two of us then put the partition back together.  After that and the
laugh, the dentist's hands weren't shaking any more, so he'd put yet
another shot of novacaine in my mouth, waited to make sure it was in
effect and finished killing the nerve, taking the impressions for the new
tooth, and filling in the space with a for-now fake.

"About that time the violent patient came back in, and popped into my
cubicle demanding that the dentist try again.  The patient was met with
another breakdown into laughter by *both* of us; but *did* manage to sit
still for the shot, this time.

"The week afterwards my mouth was sore from all the shots he had had to put
into it, plus the root canal itself, but whenever it hurt too bad, I'd
remember what happened and had to laugh...

"The neat thing is that when my parents got the bill a month later, it was
for about 50% of the normal price for bridges and root canals."

-- 
Phyllis Rostykus    | "... and how you feel can make it real  | - _US_
aka Liralen Li      | Real as anything you've seen            |   Peter
li@Data-IO.com      | Get a life with this dreamer's dream."  |   Gabriel
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