Oh, the pain, the pain!

Well, it doesn't actually hurt yet - I'm still numb. But fully lucid (apart from the adrenaline etc), thank god. I went to the dentist today.

The place I chose - Tony's dentist - was fully booked until the end of July, so the receptionist told me to come in and just sit around in the waiting room to see if a dentist comes free.

Now, this has been a long, slow process trying to get somewhere. First I had to get hold of the insurance company which was a mission, then I had to wait until I'd stayed my paid nights in Edinburgh, then find a dentist - did you know there are no good dentist-reviewing websites on the net? Once Tony had told me about his dentist, getting hold of them proved harder than I thought - there was this odd noise on the end of the line and Tony didn't know what it meant any more than I did. But I tried a few more times and eventually got through.

I was therefore, with all these little annoying obstacles in mind, pretty unsurpried when I turned up and was asked to go away and wait somewhere else for an hour because the surgery was closing for lunch.

I came back when they opened, and waited a while. It was a surprisingly short time before this nice, pretty young blonde Polish (so Tony tells me) lady came out to fetch me in to the surgery. She sat me down, had a look, and told me that the wisdom tooth that I was blaming was actually not the main problem. While it has the potential to become a problem in future (it is coming in sideways - "impacted", as they call it), the cause of the current issue is a wisdom tooth which has come through without any problems but is now biting down on my cheek and the tooth below, kinda mashing it a bit. "So we will remove the top one," she said.

"The top one?!" It took a little while for me to get that while the pain was mostly in my cheek and bottom gum, it was the fault of the top one. And then, even longer to come to terms with the fact that I was not going to have to be sedated, or have my jaw broken in to little bits, or any other of the plethora of frankly quite frightening (not to mention icky) things which need to be done to remove impacted wisdom teeth. Then just a bit more time to realise that after about a week of trying to get it sorted, it was all going to happen today. Right Now.

"So if you like, we can start numbing you up now. It will take about ten minutes, and then another five minutes to remove the tooth. Simple." After days of freaking out about having to have a long and painful operation, this sounded almost too good to be true. Eventually I got my head around it, and I am now one evil cheek-mashing tooth-o-wisdom the poorer, and one neat x-ray, some antibiotics and a report to the insurance company the richer. Problem solved!

And she said I was very brave.