Thursday, September 2, 2010

I wanna be my own smiley face

Gums. Not wine gums or gummy bears (worms, fish, etc.), but mouth gums.

Mine are healing after my surgery three weeks ago.  I'd always heard that your mouth recovers faster than anything on/in your body, but after my last extraction, I didn't believe it.  After a crown failure, I had what was left of a tooth extracted.  Only, the dentist left some silver behind, remnant of an old root canal.  So when the bridge/crown next to it broke, the root had to be extracted and the oral surgeon went after that piece of silver, too.

It didn't hurt half as much (or even a quarter) as I thought it would, and unlike the last time I had a tooth out, this guy put in four stitches.  They nearly drove me nuts, but they came out last week.

Whoa!  Ya know that meteor crater in Arizona?  Well, that's what it felt like in my mouth.  It took FIVE MONTHS to heal for that last extraction.  I figured this would take as long.  And man, everything that went into my mouth seemed to end up in that crater.

But a funny thing happened.  In the week since the stitches came out, the crater has started to fill in.  There's no big void.  It's still kind of sunken, like a ... well ... sink hole, but it really is healing like mad.

Going around looking like a hillbilly is not fun, but I'm seeing light at the end of the tunnel.  Maybe I WILL have a complete smile a lot sooner than I expected.

I feel hopeful.

Anything got you feeling hopeful?