The Uprooting of Wisdom

The aggravating pain in my tooth has been replaced by something worse..the fear of having it extracted. I went to the dentist last week to see if she could kill me mercifully and rid me of my toothache. Instead, after a lot of horrified gasps and scandalized expressions she seriously explained that I had to have my wisdom teeth removed. Not tooth mind you, all four teeth. At this point my boyfriend went into some sort of stupor and refused to wake up till Seinfeld came on later that evening.

Still sick to the stomach with the tons of antibiotics that were being pumped into my system, I decided to call on my family to garner some much needed sympathy. My sister was speeding on the 280 interstate when I called her. I ended up talking to her children's nanny instead. She sounded sorry for me but between my pain and her Californian accent I barely fathomed that tooth extractions were terrible in general but I would pull through.

When I finally reached my sister on her cell phone, she was trapped in rush hour traffic and the danger of her recently done hairdo falling apart. This certainly did not help her mood or my cause in any way. She was very brief and very clear. Her first tooth extraction back in India had ended in some kind of muscular spasm. The fiend in dentist's clothes sought to alleviate her pain by cracking her jaw . Now any lesser mortal than her would have passed out. Being my sister (and a formidable one) she was just driven to tears. Her second extraction was in the United States and involved general anesthesia and some form of sawing. At this point, I don't remember any more of the conversation. I blame the cell phone reception for abruptly breaking off.

Not having met with much success on the sympathy front with my sister, I proceeded to call another member who I felt would surely understand my agony. My brother had just consumed a filling dinner and the better part of a ripened bottle of Pinot Noir. He was in a very expansive mood and to my mind, seemed exactly what the doctor had prescribed. An hour later, I was still on the phone. I could not tell if that dull numbing pain throbbing through my head was emanating from my decayed tooth or from having listened to my brother describe in gory detail all his escapades at the dentist's clinic. The sweat drenched dentist, the discovery of another tooth clinging to his wisdom tooth like an unholy siamese twin, the shattered pieces...I shuddered but nothing could shake off those images.

When I awoke the next day, the antibiotic had taken effect and I felt like a new person. Brave and ready to take on the world and rid it of its imperfections like so many rotten wisdom teeth. So it was with great gusto that I called my parents in India to cheerfully apprise them of my tooth situation. My father's compassion was well-received but short lived. Hardly few minutes into the conversation, he launched into the story of his first extraction as a young, penniless graduate student in Europe. The extraction was fine he explained, it was the torrent of blood that came after like a blood bath that wasn't. And it's best I don't repeat his other story of the dentist with a hammer and chisel. He painted a picture so gruesome that it sounded like it came straight out of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Personally, I think he enjoyed telling me that story. As for me, I was just glad that I had no more family members to call.

My advice to you: Don't look for sympathy..you may get something worse.