So guess who got their wisdom teeth remove?!

(If you guessed anyone else but me, no cookies for you.)

I had my appointment at 12:30pm and it last until around 3pm. I was only getting two of them removed (top and bottom on the left side – right side is getting done next week!). I initially got 6 injections of anesthetic (freezing) and they waited about 5 minutes for me to be fully numbed. The bottom wisdom tooth took the bulk of the time (nearly 2 hours for that one tooth), it was impacted against the tooth in front of it and they had to make an incision and break the tooth into pieces in order to remove it. My only complaint during this time is that my dentist kept on going ‘Don’t do that!’ to the assistant, which really does not help with my confidence in her capabilities, and everyone kept on blocking my view of the movie that was playing on the ceiling (I got to watch, in its entirety, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. Very cute movie if you haven’t already seen it. They only show animated children’s films there.).

Oh, the worst part of the entire time? Once he finished stitching up the hole that he made on the bottom, he started working on the top and I was in absolute pain. I’m not sure if it was because the initial freezing had worn off at this point or if it wasn’t numbed enough to begin with. He had to stop and then give me two more injections (8, cripes) and wait to make sure I was completely numbed before continuing. Top tooth took under half an hour because the tooth was completely out and just needed to be pulled (i.e. not impacted and causing a lot of trouble!). So no stitches and nothing difficult there.

I got sent home with a sheet of care instructions, a (pink – they always give me pink and never green) toothbrush with super-soft bristles (child sized, so I can be more careful), sterile gauze (yum) and a prescription for antibiotics. The dentist didn’t check my chart first, clearly, because he wrote me a prescription for something that I’m allergic too. I took one look at it and had to make noise (was biting down on gauze, so couldn’t really talk) against the wall to get his attention and I pointed to the prescription and then he looks at my chart, goes “Oh.” and rewrites a prescription for something that I can take (yay). Not impressed with his lack of paying attention to a patient’s allergy. Not impressed at all.

The medical insurance plan that I’m currently under via my mom’s work plan used to cover more – now I believe I pay around 10% for dental. Heh. The total damage for two teeth getting removed, plus the anesthesia, was just over $450. I’m assuming that it’ll cost about that much next week too. The medication only cost a grand total of $6.51 though, which was nice. Go generic.