Vestigial Structures: An Unfortunate and Complicated Side-Effect of Evolution
Hello. If you are reading this, you are likely some unfortunate soul who wandered a bit too far off of the carefully designated path created by Google's search engine display algorithm, or you are one of the wonderful individuals who is reading the applications to be a blogger for the MIT Admissions website, either of which is excellent and welcome here. If you do not belong to those two categories, you are my best friend, Emma, who is the only other person I told about this, and you are certainly NOT welcome, so leave. But because you're my best friend, I know you laughed and kept reading, so I guess I'll just go on anyway.
So, the purpose of shelling out $12 to buy a domain for the next year for this blog (aside from finding a positive and cathartic outlet for my feelings and thoughts, which is something me and Emma also discussed in the aforementioned conversation 🙃) was to create a space for my blogs for the blogger application to live. That is the purpose of this very post, in fact.
So, a bit of narrative before we get to the good stuff.
I have wanted to go to MIT for a good minute. I was born in Boston, it has always been my favorite place, and MIT has always exuded this grandeur and purpose that I knew I wanted to be a part of. So I've been reading the admissions blogs for a while. Like, since I was 9. I always knew that if I ever got into MIT and was able to, by some miracle, attend, I would apply to become a blogger. It should come as no surprise then, that when the cult god himself Petey posted the link to the blogger application, I was very excited. It took me a while to get to the application, though, what with my heavy self-imposed work schedule created in an effort to offset the costs of going away to college for the first time, and I am now only writing with days left. Not that that's an issue in any way specifically, but it does add a certain element of excitement to it. Anyway, I finally got around to heading over to Slideroom and previewing the requirements for the application, and I got to the first prompt under question 4. Write some blogs!:
a) What happened Tuesday?
Oh. Boy. What an absolutely perfect Tuesday for you lovely people to get to hear about. Of all of the Tuesdays of my life, this is one of the most eventful ones. It just so happens, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on where you stand in this narrative, that this past Tuesday I underwent surgery for the removal of all 4 of my heavily impacted wisdom teeth, the bottom 2 of which were wrapped around the trigeminal nerve in my face, which I later learned after some aggressive researching that I should have done before the procedure, if it had been disturbed in any way I could have had permanent paralysis in my face. You might think this sounds complicated and unpleasant enough, which it certainly is, but this is not the only piece of this nightmare. You see, the original purpose of my consulting an oral surgeon at all was to receive an estimate for getting a dental implant (those titanium screws that get screwed into your jaw and a crown placed on top) to replace my top left middle molar, which, after an initial root canal at the ripe age of 9 (brush your teeth, kids, even if your parents are too busy doing drugs to tell you to) had undergone countless procedures and disturbances in an effort to remediate complication after complication, until it was reduced to nothing more than a dead mass of calcium shards lodged in my gums. It was only upon coming to the consultation after braving messy morning rush hour New Jersey traffic and receiving a fascinating 3-dimensional x-ray from a futuristic x-ray device, that I learned that I needed to get my wisdom teeth removed right now. So, on top of that, I needed to begin the series of surgeries required to install a fake tooth in my mouth. But the interesting thing about that is, it's not, as some might think, as easy as just screwing in the screw and slapping a crown on there. There is a phenomenon that occurs in the mouth, which is something I learned about very recently, that happens when teeth get damaged or in some way are removed from a person's mouth, so they are no longer taking up the space where a tooth belongs, and that is that the jaw bone will reabsorb into the body because there is nothing taking up that space, so it becomes increasingly difficult to place the implant because there isn't any place to put it. My tooth, unfortunately, had been in a state of disrepair for years, so the bone was heavily degraded. The procedure to remedy this situation involved removing the fragments of my other tooth, opening the gums to expose the jaw bone underneath, sprinkling powdered human cadaver bone into the hole with the exposed jaw bone to fill it up, and allowing the cadaver bone to graft to my jaw and create a matrix through which my own bone would regrow and eventually replace the other bone, creating a graft suitable enough to hold a titanium screw. So on top of the previously described wisdom tooth extraction, I was advised to also have this bone graft procedure at the same time, which my oral surgeon assured me was the best course of action. Writing this, 7 days post surgery, I can enthusiastically assure you that having both of these surgeries at the same time was a grave mistake, which I will elaborate on in more detail later.
So that's what I did Tuesday.
First, I'll detail a little bit more of what actually happened the day of the surgery, then I'm going to list some important truths I've gleaned from this experience so far, in the hopes of maybe sparing anybody reading this who needs to go through something similar to this from the pitfalls I fell into.
So, they tell you not to eat anything for 12 hours before you have to undergo any sort of sedation or general anesthesia, but my doctor told me not to eat anything past 5 the night before, which was interestingly fine because I had been experiencing a mysterious stretch of nausea that week that left me with little appetite. Looking back now, I wish I had taken the opportunity to enjoy some good hard to chew, crunchy foods, because it's going to be a while before I can enjoy a meal again, which is really pissing me off, but ya know we roll with it. The morning of I was still feeling a bit nauseous, but otherwise ready. My grandma picked me up at 8:30 because my parents were occupied with work, and she took me over to the doctor's office, which, despite normally being a 15-minute drive down 80 east was a 45-minute back roads ordeal because of an overturned semi on 80, but we still made it on time because my grandma picked me up an hour early 😏. They sat me down in the operating chair and did a final health exam to make sure I was ready for anesthesia, then they gave me the laughing gas. That sensation was extremely singular. Nothing in the room changed at all, but I really felt a strange, but utterly irresistible urge to laugh. I mentioned this to the nurses, who laughed at me in turn. Then, they stuck the sedation IV drip in my arm, and that's the last thing I remember.
I woke up again to the nurses pulling bloody gauze out of my mouth, pressing cold packs to my face, and helping me to my feet. I was utterly incapable of standing for a solid 10 minutes after I woke up. The sedative clung to my limbs and my eyes and turned the world into a cloudy, stimulus-free haze. Eventually, though, I stumbled onto my feet and into my grandmother's car. She had picked up a multitude of soft foods for me to eat post-surgery, and we grabbed my prescriptions for antibiotics and the generic for percocet and headed home. Lucky for me, this happened to be an insane heat wave in northern Jersey and the AC in the upper levels of my house (where my room resides) was broken. So I was forced away from the sweltering 90 degree air of my room and confined to the living room couch, where I had little privacy. My grandma watched me struggle to choke down my antibiotics and some ibuprofen with some Ensure and my numb mouth, then she kissed me goodbye, wished me a "Get well soon", and went back home. My dad was working downstairs, so all was well.
That's pretty much it for that. On to the advice.
Things to know for wisdom teeth/dental implant bone graft surgery:
1. When you talk to everyone who has had wisdom teeth surgery and read all the information online, you will hear that it only takes 3-4 days to recover fully, and then you'll be back to eating normally. Hell no. This is not the case for all people. Especially if a person's wisdom teeth are extremely impacted, which all 4 of mine were. If this is the case, it could take considerably longer. As previously disclosed, I am at day 7 and still feel NOWHERE NEAR "fully recovered", and certainly not able to eat normally again.
2. DO NOT GET BOTH OF THESE SURGERIES AT THE SAME TIME!!! It is soooooo annoying to have to nurse the stitches from your wisdom teeth while also being forced to put uneven stress on one side of your mouth because you can't disturb the bone powder on the other side. It's causing my teeth to be really raw and sensitive to temperature, It's irritating the stitches on the bottom right side of my mouth and preventing them from healing, it's tiring out my jaw muscles and giving me tension headaches, etc. Don't do that shit.
3. Don't let anybody, including your doctor, tell you that you have to put something in your body that you don't want to. Just because they prescribe you narcotics, doesn't mean that you have to take them, especially if it makes you uncomfortable. Not to mention, it is perfectly survivable pain-wise without them, as I can attest.
4. Start brushing your teeth as soon as possible after. Seriously. Your breath will smell so bad from the wounds and it really helps the healing and your comfort to have your mouth clean.
5. Rinse with salt water. All. The. Time. Salt has the magical property of not only being antiseptic and helping keep infection at bay, but it also has some pain-relief powers as well. Rinsing thoroughly with salt water as much as you can stand, at least 2-3 times a day, and especially every time you eat or drink anything, really works to alleviate pain.
So that is what happened to me on Tuesday, and that is my first blog. Hopefully you enjoyed, and weren't too bored, or grossed out, or both. Basically, vestigial structures are the worst part of evolution and wisdom teeth surgery is a bad time. Prepare yourself before you undergo that mess.
So, the purpose of shelling out $12 to buy a domain for the next year for this blog (aside from finding a positive and cathartic outlet for my feelings and thoughts, which is something me and Emma also discussed in the aforementioned conversation 🙃) was to create a space for my blogs for the blogger application to live. That is the purpose of this very post, in fact.
So, a bit of narrative before we get to the good stuff.
I have wanted to go to MIT for a good minute. I was born in Boston, it has always been my favorite place, and MIT has always exuded this grandeur and purpose that I knew I wanted to be a part of. So I've been reading the admissions blogs for a while. Like, since I was 9. I always knew that if I ever got into MIT and was able to, by some miracle, attend, I would apply to become a blogger. It should come as no surprise then, that when the cult god himself Petey posted the link to the blogger application, I was very excited. It took me a while to get to the application, though, what with my heavy self-imposed work schedule created in an effort to offset the costs of going away to college for the first time, and I am now only writing with days left. Not that that's an issue in any way specifically, but it does add a certain element of excitement to it. Anyway, I finally got around to heading over to Slideroom and previewing the requirements for the application, and I got to the first prompt under question 4. Write some blogs!:
a) What happened Tuesday?
Oh. Boy. What an absolutely perfect Tuesday for you lovely people to get to hear about. Of all of the Tuesdays of my life, this is one of the most eventful ones. It just so happens, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on where you stand in this narrative, that this past Tuesday I underwent surgery for the removal of all 4 of my heavily impacted wisdom teeth, the bottom 2 of which were wrapped around the trigeminal nerve in my face, which I later learned after some aggressive researching that I should have done before the procedure, if it had been disturbed in any way I could have had permanent paralysis in my face. You might think this sounds complicated and unpleasant enough, which it certainly is, but this is not the only piece of this nightmare. You see, the original purpose of my consulting an oral surgeon at all was to receive an estimate for getting a dental implant (those titanium screws that get screwed into your jaw and a crown placed on top) to replace my top left middle molar, which, after an initial root canal at the ripe age of 9 (brush your teeth, kids, even if your parents are too busy doing drugs to tell you to) had undergone countless procedures and disturbances in an effort to remediate complication after complication, until it was reduced to nothing more than a dead mass of calcium shards lodged in my gums. It was only upon coming to the consultation after braving messy morning rush hour New Jersey traffic and receiving a fascinating 3-dimensional x-ray from a futuristic x-ray device, that I learned that I needed to get my wisdom teeth removed right now. So, on top of that, I needed to begin the series of surgeries required to install a fake tooth in my mouth. But the interesting thing about that is, it's not, as some might think, as easy as just screwing in the screw and slapping a crown on there. There is a phenomenon that occurs in the mouth, which is something I learned about very recently, that happens when teeth get damaged or in some way are removed from a person's mouth, so they are no longer taking up the space where a tooth belongs, and that is that the jaw bone will reabsorb into the body because there is nothing taking up that space, so it becomes increasingly difficult to place the implant because there isn't any place to put it. My tooth, unfortunately, had been in a state of disrepair for years, so the bone was heavily degraded. The procedure to remedy this situation involved removing the fragments of my other tooth, opening the gums to expose the jaw bone underneath, sprinkling powdered human cadaver bone into the hole with the exposed jaw bone to fill it up, and allowing the cadaver bone to graft to my jaw and create a matrix through which my own bone would regrow and eventually replace the other bone, creating a graft suitable enough to hold a titanium screw. So on top of the previously described wisdom tooth extraction, I was advised to also have this bone graft procedure at the same time, which my oral surgeon assured me was the best course of action. Writing this, 7 days post surgery, I can enthusiastically assure you that having both of these surgeries at the same time was a grave mistake, which I will elaborate on in more detail later.
So that's what I did Tuesday.
First, I'll detail a little bit more of what actually happened the day of the surgery, then I'm going to list some important truths I've gleaned from this experience so far, in the hopes of maybe sparing anybody reading this who needs to go through something similar to this from the pitfalls I fell into.
So, they tell you not to eat anything for 12 hours before you have to undergo any sort of sedation or general anesthesia, but my doctor told me not to eat anything past 5 the night before, which was interestingly fine because I had been experiencing a mysterious stretch of nausea that week that left me with little appetite. Looking back now, I wish I had taken the opportunity to enjoy some good hard to chew, crunchy foods, because it's going to be a while before I can enjoy a meal again, which is really pissing me off, but ya know we roll with it. The morning of I was still feeling a bit nauseous, but otherwise ready. My grandma picked me up at 8:30 because my parents were occupied with work, and she took me over to the doctor's office, which, despite normally being a 15-minute drive down 80 east was a 45-minute back roads ordeal because of an overturned semi on 80, but we still made it on time because my grandma picked me up an hour early 😏. They sat me down in the operating chair and did a final health exam to make sure I was ready for anesthesia, then they gave me the laughing gas. That sensation was extremely singular. Nothing in the room changed at all, but I really felt a strange, but utterly irresistible urge to laugh. I mentioned this to the nurses, who laughed at me in turn. Then, they stuck the sedation IV drip in my arm, and that's the last thing I remember.
I woke up again to the nurses pulling bloody gauze out of my mouth, pressing cold packs to my face, and helping me to my feet. I was utterly incapable of standing for a solid 10 minutes after I woke up. The sedative clung to my limbs and my eyes and turned the world into a cloudy, stimulus-free haze. Eventually, though, I stumbled onto my feet and into my grandmother's car. She had picked up a multitude of soft foods for me to eat post-surgery, and we grabbed my prescriptions for antibiotics and the generic for percocet and headed home. Lucky for me, this happened to be an insane heat wave in northern Jersey and the AC in the upper levels of my house (where my room resides) was broken. So I was forced away from the sweltering 90 degree air of my room and confined to the living room couch, where I had little privacy. My grandma watched me struggle to choke down my antibiotics and some ibuprofen with some Ensure and my numb mouth, then she kissed me goodbye, wished me a "Get well soon", and went back home. My dad was working downstairs, so all was well.
That's pretty much it for that. On to the advice.
Things to know for wisdom teeth/dental implant bone graft surgery:
1. When you talk to everyone who has had wisdom teeth surgery and read all the information online, you will hear that it only takes 3-4 days to recover fully, and then you'll be back to eating normally. Hell no. This is not the case for all people. Especially if a person's wisdom teeth are extremely impacted, which all 4 of mine were. If this is the case, it could take considerably longer. As previously disclosed, I am at day 7 and still feel NOWHERE NEAR "fully recovered", and certainly not able to eat normally again.
2. DO NOT GET BOTH OF THESE SURGERIES AT THE SAME TIME!!! It is soooooo annoying to have to nurse the stitches from your wisdom teeth while also being forced to put uneven stress on one side of your mouth because you can't disturb the bone powder on the other side. It's causing my teeth to be really raw and sensitive to temperature, It's irritating the stitches on the bottom right side of my mouth and preventing them from healing, it's tiring out my jaw muscles and giving me tension headaches, etc. Don't do that shit.
3. Don't let anybody, including your doctor, tell you that you have to put something in your body that you don't want to. Just because they prescribe you narcotics, doesn't mean that you have to take them, especially if it makes you uncomfortable. Not to mention, it is perfectly survivable pain-wise without them, as I can attest.
4. Start brushing your teeth as soon as possible after. Seriously. Your breath will smell so bad from the wounds and it really helps the healing and your comfort to have your mouth clean.
5. Rinse with salt water. All. The. Time. Salt has the magical property of not only being antiseptic and helping keep infection at bay, but it also has some pain-relief powers as well. Rinsing thoroughly with salt water as much as you can stand, at least 2-3 times a day, and especially every time you eat or drink anything, really works to alleviate pain.
So that is what happened to me on Tuesday, and that is my first blog. Hopefully you enjoyed, and weren't too bored, or grossed out, or both. Basically, vestigial structures are the worst part of evolution and wisdom teeth surgery is a bad time. Prepare yourself before you undergo that mess.
Comments
Post a Comment