I had the surgery done about eight hours ago, so I'm still a bit cranky, but at least the procedure's fresh in my mind. As a
disclaimer, this is not from a medical standpoint. To start, I should explain why I had it done locally (
Novocaine) instead of generally. I suffer from a bit of
hypertension and I'm overweight, so local
anesthesia is many times safer, so it appealed to me. That being said, I'm going to tell you that if you do not have a fairly high fear tolerance, the surgery gets very intense while you're awake. If I didn't have my health problems, I probably would've gone with a general. However, that is not what happened, so you get to read my recount of the event I witnessed.
First off, the surgeon sprayed some topical inside my mouth to numb my gums up for the shots. You would probably think that this dinky spray could not possibly numb your mouth, but it does so very quickly. After receiving a considerable amount of Novocaine, the surgeon left me to let it set in. He came back in and asked me how it was doing. I wanted to let him know I thought I could use a bit more, but instead I slurred like a drunken bum. He gave me a few more shots so that I wouldn't feel anything for several hours after the surgery, and then things got started. He was kind enough to provide me with a blindfold so that I wouldn't have to see anything going on. This helped me out a lot more than I thought it would. Onto the surgery.
The first thing that he did involved a lot of scraping and sawing, so I'll assume that he was cutting away the skin to get to the tooth. Then he did some additional scraping that made a bone-slicing sound, which I believe was him making grooves to aid in the next step. He got out his little rotary knife (I see it described as a drill in the writeups above, but the feeling of pressure seemed localized, so I don't believe he was moving something as focused as a drill around) and cut it into quarters. This makes a lot of noise, and I found it to be incredibly nerve-racking. However, in comparison to the actual extraction portion, it's only a minor annoyance. Now we come to the part of the procedure that I have never actually read anywhere. You would think that with all of our modern medicine and technology that they'd have a fascinating and innovative way of removing a quartered tooth. They don't. Basically he grabbed ahold of the tooth with some device (felt like a torque wrench) and started to twist as hard as he could. The most God-forsaken cracking noise followed, at which point I nearly lost all bowel control. Thankfully I retained composure, but the cracking noise is probably the worst sound I have ever heard, especially knowing that it came from inside my head. After repeating this procedure three more times, with only minor difficulties with my bottom righty, he sutured them all and I was given tons of gauze. I got up and my mom drove me home. Having written all of this, only two or three times during the procedure did I feel anything close to resembling pain. Before I could actually raise my hand (apparently the oral surgeon lingo for "Jesus God stop the pain"), the pain subsided.
The Next Day
Okay, the above is a lot of incoherent rambling, mainly because I had taken my pain medication (Tylenol 3) and I had assumed it did nothing for me. I plan to correct this right about now, about 25 hours after the Novocaine actually wore off (28 hours after surgery), because I am somewhat more composed. I want to start by reiterating the actual extraction procedure. When I say they wrench the tooth bits out, I mean they wrench them out. On my bottom right tooth he consistently stretched my lip and cheek very tightly. Thankfully there was no bruising, but it was very uncomfortable.
Now, the pain started to kick in about three hours after the surgery. The Tylenol 3 didn't really do much for me other than make me groggy. I fell asleep at about 10:30pm and woke up hourly for about 5 minutes. At about 6:30am, though, I started to sleep on my side and this helped considerably. I slept, with a few interruptions, until 1:30pm today. The pain has almost completely gone other than the usual soreness. I can actually eat soup with chunks of vegetables, so everything seems to be turning out all right.