My wisdom is gone.

I've been lucky in several things throughout my life. One of them happens to be that I got my dad's teeth. While both of my sisters got to enjoy all the rights and privileges of braces (and yes, I'm referring to those cool little rubber bands that came with them), I was lucky enough to not only never need braces, but I also never seemed to get a cavity. So each time we went to the dentist, it was always the same thing: your teeth look great, you just need to clean them better (I still don't floss to this day. Sorry dad.).

So imagine my surprise when I went to the dentist at the end of my contract in Uijeongbu in May with a toothache and a possible cavity, only to find out that I had SEVEN cavities. I got them all filled for a bargain price by western standards, with a caution that one of my wisdom teeth in the back had a rather large cavity, and if it kept bothering me I'd need to have it pulled. The reason the first dentist didn't think they could pull it themselves was because the roots were very curved, and apparently that makes it harder to pull out.

My teeth have been bothering me again recently, so I looked up a dentist in my area that speaks English (thank you Google), and made an appointment during my lunch break today for this evening. After a relatively short consultation, we decided to pull out both the bottom and top wisdom teeth on the left side. The reason to pull both was simple - without the bottom tooth, the top tooth had nothing to grind against and was therefore useless.

He applied a local topical anesthetic, but it didn't seem to have any effect. Then he pulled out this rather daunting needle and started poking around in the back of my mouth with it.


After poking around a bit more, he said to wait three minutes and he'd be back. It took a while to be able to tell that anything was working but I knew something was up when part of my lips started to go numb. He then proceeded to extract my teeth.

I guess I always figured it was a relatively simple process, but from the sound and feel of it, it also requires a bit of elbow grease as well. I'm no dentist, and I certainly couldn't see what he was doing, but my impressions of what was going on were that he started by trying to grip the tooth with pliers. Once he'd loosened the tooth a bit, he used another tool to hook underneath the main part (where the roots are), and lever it up. I could feel what he was doing in my jaw and in my nose, so he must have been pulling pretty hard. He got the top one (the easy one) out in about 15 minutes. The bottom one took a bit longer, and he said he got it about halfway out but had to cut it in two pieces in order to remove it the rest of the way.

Up until this point, I'd been fine. Nothing had hurt, though the sensation of pressure in your teeth being transferred to your nasal cavity is quite ... different. It did start to hurt on the lower tooth, however, and he had to put that weird needle in again. I'd been fine mentally as well, but I did get a bit nervous when he said he was going to cut my tooth. When your lips and tongue are numb (and hence, you have no control over them), and someone has a tool in your mouth capable of cutting through hard enamel (and hence, also through soft tissue like lips and gums), it's not abnormal to be a little nervous.

Anyway, they both came out fine in the end, and I've been instructed to come back in a week to have the one stitch removed. I have medicine for the pain (which hasn't set in. yet), and gauze in case I need to change what I already have. I also have both of my teeth, to the slight befuddlement and amusement of the dentist. His response when I asked if I could keep them? "In that condition? Really?"

Oh yeah, and this was at the bargain price of about $15. :)