the last post-surgery
July 21, 2021
It was hard to explain why I couldn’t just take the Ibuprofen. I didn’t even know myself. Maybe it was because this was the last time I would feel pain from an incident dragged out 13 long years, and numbing such a pain would be a cop-out end to the many years I had already laid down. Or maybe it was because I couldn’t swallow pills. Whatever the case, I sat there, teeth clenched against the isolated pounding of Tooth 8’s gum beat, beat, beating.
I always pinch myself when the dentist injects anesthetics into my gum. A secondary pain really does mitigate the primary point of discomfort; I wonder if it has anything to do with the physics experiment where lying across a bed of nails feels less painful than on a singular point, as if the summation of many hurts averages out instead of compounding. During today’s surgery, foreign fingers prodded around my half-open mouth. I probably bit them, subconsciously, because when pressure is combined with numbness it’s hard to tell whether I’m the perpetrator or victim. I’ll never get used to the strange tickle of surgical string being pulled through my gums, my open cut a sewing pad for a dentist-in-training.
When the operation is over, I hold my black phone screen up before me, peering at the new cuts in my mouth. There are two slits along either side of the root, separating a swipe of pale purple flesh from its pink surrounding. It looks unfinished, as all surgeries do, their black incision lines caked with dried blood.
As I get up to go, packing the flimsy shreds of dignity I had left on the reclining chair, the receptionist asks how everything went. I can’t respond with the same confidence that I entered this white office in; I’m drooling from a numb lip unable to seal itself, and padded with dry tear streaks that fling horizontally off my eyes like invisible eyeliner. So instead of talking, I just clench my teeth against the ebbing effects of anesthesia, because experience tells me that a secondary pain can quell the dominant ache.