Traumatized

Last week when I visited Dr. J (my famous long suffering secret agent dentist) he was kind enough to diagnose the annoying bump in my mouth that I kept biting. "That is a Traumatic Fibroma," he announced, and instantly it felt ten times more painful and annoying than it did when it was just a bump. I received a referral to an oral surgeon to get it removed, and in the meantime I had a little fun telling my family and about 50 of my closest friends that I was going to need surgery to remove a traumatic fibroma. It sounds so serious yet funny to me!

So today at 3:15 I left work and drove a few blocks to the oral surgeon's office, a beautiful new tastefully decorated building. It was nice to see a friend working inside, but I was bitterly disappointed with the magazine selection. Very oriented to outdoor manly pursuits. Fortunately I had my phone and could text Will so I could feel his devoted support.

The young assistant led me to a room where she went over some paperwork and had me initial each of the hundred or so things that could go wrong. Before she left the room she said, "OK, pretty soon we'll numb you up and hack it off!" Oh, boy! She was very kind though. When she told me to sit on the chair, I sadly remarked how disappointing it was that it had no arms to grip. When she came back for the procedure, she moved me to a different room that had a chair with arm rests!

The doctor seemed awfully young. He told me I probably shouldn't go home and google fibroma because it could alarm me with things that didn't pertain to this type. I told him it was too late, I had googled traumatic fibroma and learned that the treatment was excision and the prognosis was excellent, so it was all good. He liked that.

He gave me three shots of a local anesthetic before starting the procedure, which actually went very quickly. It probably took less than five minutes to hack it off and put three stitches in. When he finished, he was holding some gauze onto it for a bit and he said, "While I was waiting for the anesthetic to work, I googled a step by step procedure to remove this, and holding the gauze in place for a few minutes is the last step. It's just great how easy it was." I told him how disappointed I was that it was over so quickly, and he confessed that actually he is a baseball coach at West Albany and just came over to work for the day for a change of pace. It's kind of hard to laugh heartily when you have a few fingers and a big wad of gauze in your mouth. But I managed anyway.

Well, I still have a little gauze in my mouth, and the numbness is wearing off. I'm starting to think it might have been wise to take him up on the offer for some Percocet. But I will make do with non-prescription pain relievers. Ouch. They say the mouth heals very quickly. We shall see.