photo by Mary Foran on Valentines Day.
Shortly before the fork situation arose.
I split a tooth on Sunday. Good ol' Number 4, upper right molar, split top to bottom.
I got to take a trip to the oral surgeon's! The video above is part of what happened there. Extraction & bone graft. Some of the still photography is by Jed from Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery of San Francisco. Thanks, Jed.
An indeterminate number of cadavers were harmed in the making of this video. For the bone graft, you understand. Thank you, cadaver(s). I am grateful to the dead. Never met the blighter(s). Not that I'm aware of, anyway.
My sister Meg asked about graft-vs-host reaction. I remember talking to my periodontist about this when I received a cadaver-bone-graft last year. He explained that the material that gets engrafted is denatured to the point that it no longer has immunocapability, it's really just a structural support that encourages new bone tissue to grow into it. My immune system doesn't reject the graft for the same reason. It's not alive, you see, so there's no urgent reason for the body to get rid of it. And despite the fact that I'm partially made up of dead people, I don't seem to be compelled to gnaw upon the living. Imagine my relief.
During the pre-op waiting-around period, I was sitting in the immobilizr-o-stat chair waiting to be attached to the IV drip which would put me into "twilight anesthesia":
...and they were playing some local radio on the sound system, don't you know. And every ten minutes or so, that song by Pink? "Please Don't Leave Me"? With the video in which she assumes a sadistic nurse persona?
That would play on the radio, followed by a teaser for a news story about Michael Jackson's doctor, who, you'll recall, had a little boo-boo with the IV drip that he'd rigged up for the King of Pop. Pleasant dreams!
I must say, the anesthesia worked wonderfully. I really don't remember a thing.
