(no subject)
For some reason I have heartburn and a strangely sexual feeling keeping me up tonight so I might as well go over the long diatribe of my hospitalization experience. (As far as staying up I imagine the first symptom is due to actually lying flat on a regular bed and the second I'm unsure of at all but I'm not arguing against it.)
I don't think I have enough words to really go over the whole experience. You hear about life changing events or near death experiences and never think very much of them, but then again how often do you experience them yourself? I remember thinking as a teenager a long time ago that I sat on death's razor edge as I contemplated suicide but truth was I don't think I ever contemplated true suicide, I was more arranging for some type of masochistic punishment rather than truly ending it all, it was more an attention grabbing device to state 'I could go there' even though I was no where near. Hell if I was, no one would have ever known about it.
For those that have no idea what I'm rambling about, the short of the story is this:
Come June I started getting a ton of pain in my jaw from my wisdom teeth. Naturally, since I work for Bank of America now and actually have a great insurance package and money to spend on medical bills, I start seeing a dentist. They start going over all the other tooth work that wasn't been done in a decade before they decide to handle my wisdom teeth and that's fine with me. Five cavities and a cleaning to prevent gum disease after not having seen a dentist in ten years is probably a remarkable state for my mouth to be in. I continue to suffer from wisdom tooth pain during all this other work, but I manage to get prescriptions for pain medication while I'm waiting to set up the wisdom teeth to be pulled. Finally, I get it scheduled. First I have a preliminary appointment to meet with the oral surgeon. Now at this point in time I have an open hole in my gums where one wisdom tooth is coming out, it's quite painful. Oral surgeon tells me that unless some sort of infection develops ahead of time, all they had to do was call in a prescription the day before the extraction to knock me out, go over the surgery paperwork ahead of time and that's fine with me. So on the day of the extraction I get the prescription and take one pill an hour ahead of the appointment as prescribed, which is a sleeping aide that's supposed to knock me out. I never actually did get knocked out at all, as a matter of fact all that did was raise my adrenaline level and make me more nervous during the procedure.
Oral surgeon goes to work removing the teeth. For the top two it's clean sailing, all fine and dandy. The extremely painful one he had to do some cutting into the gums, but that I expected as it was a tooth that wouldn't come all the way out. Then there's the one on my lower right jaw, the only wisdom tooth I had that wouldn't emerge from the gums at all. He ended up having to saw off some of the bone in my jaw to free that tooth. I knew I was going to be in for a painful and probably longer recovery as soon as he mentioned it. So once the procedure's done Norm's mother shows up to pick me up from the dentist's office. I'm pretty loopy and out of it but with the anesthetics I'm not too surprised at that. So in leaving the office, I'm given a prescription for a medicated oral rinse and some pain medication. I'm also instructed to use a salt rinse after meals and given all the instructions to prevent dry socket. Since I'm loopy and out of it, I go home, go to sleep. Later on in the night I wake up screaming from the pain which alarms Norm, but I take pain medication and eventually get back to sleep.
Next day I'm in agony. The pain medication is doing nothing, I have a fever, and as the day progresses I start vomiting and my jaw is swollen. I wanted to go to the hospital that night, but Norm advises we go to the dentist's office the next morning as there was probably a practical solution that wouldn't have a huge ER bill attached to it. Practical advice, I wish I hadn't taken it though. The next morning I'm still consistently vomiting, in a ton of pain, and now my neck is swelling up also. I see a different dentist than the one that pulled my teeth. She prescribes me anti-biotics and more pain medication. I get home, I'm vomiting so often I can't keep the anti-biotics down. Call the dentist back, she says to go to the emergency room. I call 9-11 since I don't have a car and don't have anybody to take me to the ER. Ambulance gets there and they won't take me as they say I'm not an emergency as I can still breathe and my heart is beating just fine. Right after the ambulance refuses to take me to the hospital, the oral surgeon calls me and tells me he called in a prescription for me for a suppository to keep me from vomiting. I decide to try and stick that out with that plan for the night since I couldn't get to the emergency room anyways. Didn't do shit. I'm at the point by the time Norm gets home from work the next day where I'm not moving and just delirious in pain, constantly vomiting and dry-heaving if I can't vomit. By this time also, the entire right side of my face in addition to my throat is completely swollen and blown up so I finally get taken to the hospital.
I tell you it took a week's worth of two different anti-biotics pumping into an IV at once in addition to two surgeries to get over the infection that had spread from where the bone had been sawed off in my jaw down to my neck and throat. Had the infection spread anymore, it would have been fatal considering it had either my heart and lungs or brain to go to.
So what did I learn from all of this? First of all if you plan on doing any type of surgery period, prescribe fucking anti-biotics. The oral surgeon that took my wisdom teeth should have had me on them before he even took those teeth out. Second, 9-11 doesn't work unless you're having a heart or asthma attack evidently. Third, I need a car for emergencies. (Isn't that a given?) Fourth, practicality needs to be shot in the head sometimes. I love Norm, I understood why he kept going to work and encouraging me to go to the dentist instead of the ER, but it almost damn well cost me my life. I'm bitter about that, not that I'm bitter at him but it seems shitty that the wiser path is the more fatal one in this case.
So there, in a nutshell, is the two weeks worth of hell I just went through.
The philosophical implications are a bit more fun. First of all I find myself examining practicality more and more. It seems that in most cases practicality is usually a wise attitude to have. After all, impulse decisions more often than not get you into trouble. This whole experience however has me hating practicality. It's not just the almost dying thing that gets me, there's other aspects of it as well. For instance, I'm at the point where I'm ready to settle down, get married, have kids. Norm? Well it's not practical to. We have bills we have to pay off first of all, then savings we have to set aside. A wedding's going to cost so much money...He thinks getting married would 'ruin a good thing' and that having pets is more practical and akin enough to having kids. For vacation and getting away from it all, sitting at home playing video games is the practical, cheap answer to entertainment. Here also, because I have a good guy that takes care of me, financially helps me out, doesn't treat me badly, it's 'practical' to stay with him even though we want to the relationship to evolve or not evolve in our own ways.
As you can see, I'm frustrated with such practicality. It's dry, it's hollow, it almost killed me and it's leeching every last bit of romance out of my relationship. I don't want to have to sit in a hospital bed crying because I'm not sure whether or not I'm going to live to see the next day and despising the fear and uncertainty of the agnosticism I've always embraced. I don't want to be a slave to bills, living on their whims and their whims alone. I don't want some hollow damn existence where all I fucking do is work, play games, avoid making love to my partner because I'm 'not in the mood', rinse, repeat, with nothing to leave behind of myself except copies saved of all the bills I've had and payments I've made.
So moving forward after my near-death experience I've determined what it is I definitely want with life:
I want to write books. That can easily be arrange in my spare time, I still need a damn netbook to be able to do it. Reasoning, I want to leave my mark on the world. I don't want in the end my life's legacy to be the sum of what you can find based on my social security number, rather I want something tangible. I don't understand why people don't get that and think I'm aiming outrageously high.
I want to get married and know I have a solid relationship. I don't just want to be someone's financial partner and buddy to mess around with, I want to know that I'm truly loved and wanted for the rest of my life, that they're connected to me on every level there is to be connected to me on.
I want to start attending a Buddhist Temple. Yes, yes, I know I've always been agnostic, but after years of thinking Buddhism is the one religion I can actually follow considering it's more philosophy than dogma. After almost dying, I realize that I need more spirituality in my life and for me, Buddhism is the path to go.
I want a child. I have no rational explanation for this one but neither does anyone else really. What's wrong with that?
I also need a car and a vacation but those should be easily acquired in the next year, well at least the first one should be.
My biggest fear is that Norm won't be willing to change and won't work with me. I love him to death, I really do, (I love his family to death too) but I don't know what I'll do if he won't meet with me here. I don't think he takes me seriously either, that he views me as more of a teenager. I know it's a problem that I have, that I always assume I mean less to people than I actually do or constantly assume people think little of me, but hell what grounds have I ever had for anyone to take me seriously until recently? It seems shitty though. Here I am, I'm ready and willing to change and shape the course of the rest of my life and it seems more and more like it's coming down to having a talk with Norm. Either he'll work with me and we go forward, I have to break up with him and start anew, or I just do what I've done for years, accept what I have and be damn thankful I get at least that.
I hate fucking life, even if I cling so hard to it and am thankful to have it.
I don't think I have enough words to really go over the whole experience. You hear about life changing events or near death experiences and never think very much of them, but then again how often do you experience them yourself? I remember thinking as a teenager a long time ago that I sat on death's razor edge as I contemplated suicide but truth was I don't think I ever contemplated true suicide, I was more arranging for some type of masochistic punishment rather than truly ending it all, it was more an attention grabbing device to state 'I could go there' even though I was no where near. Hell if I was, no one would have ever known about it.
For those that have no idea what I'm rambling about, the short of the story is this:
Come June I started getting a ton of pain in my jaw from my wisdom teeth. Naturally, since I work for Bank of America now and actually have a great insurance package and money to spend on medical bills, I start seeing a dentist. They start going over all the other tooth work that wasn't been done in a decade before they decide to handle my wisdom teeth and that's fine with me. Five cavities and a cleaning to prevent gum disease after not having seen a dentist in ten years is probably a remarkable state for my mouth to be in. I continue to suffer from wisdom tooth pain during all this other work, but I manage to get prescriptions for pain medication while I'm waiting to set up the wisdom teeth to be pulled. Finally, I get it scheduled. First I have a preliminary appointment to meet with the oral surgeon. Now at this point in time I have an open hole in my gums where one wisdom tooth is coming out, it's quite painful. Oral surgeon tells me that unless some sort of infection develops ahead of time, all they had to do was call in a prescription the day before the extraction to knock me out, go over the surgery paperwork ahead of time and that's fine with me. So on the day of the extraction I get the prescription and take one pill an hour ahead of the appointment as prescribed, which is a sleeping aide that's supposed to knock me out. I never actually did get knocked out at all, as a matter of fact all that did was raise my adrenaline level and make me more nervous during the procedure.
Oral surgeon goes to work removing the teeth. For the top two it's clean sailing, all fine and dandy. The extremely painful one he had to do some cutting into the gums, but that I expected as it was a tooth that wouldn't come all the way out. Then there's the one on my lower right jaw, the only wisdom tooth I had that wouldn't emerge from the gums at all. He ended up having to saw off some of the bone in my jaw to free that tooth. I knew I was going to be in for a painful and probably longer recovery as soon as he mentioned it. So once the procedure's done Norm's mother shows up to pick me up from the dentist's office. I'm pretty loopy and out of it but with the anesthetics I'm not too surprised at that. So in leaving the office, I'm given a prescription for a medicated oral rinse and some pain medication. I'm also instructed to use a salt rinse after meals and given all the instructions to prevent dry socket. Since I'm loopy and out of it, I go home, go to sleep. Later on in the night I wake up screaming from the pain which alarms Norm, but I take pain medication and eventually get back to sleep.
Next day I'm in agony. The pain medication is doing nothing, I have a fever, and as the day progresses I start vomiting and my jaw is swollen. I wanted to go to the hospital that night, but Norm advises we go to the dentist's office the next morning as there was probably a practical solution that wouldn't have a huge ER bill attached to it. Practical advice, I wish I hadn't taken it though. The next morning I'm still consistently vomiting, in a ton of pain, and now my neck is swelling up also. I see a different dentist than the one that pulled my teeth. She prescribes me anti-biotics and more pain medication. I get home, I'm vomiting so often I can't keep the anti-biotics down. Call the dentist back, she says to go to the emergency room. I call 9-11 since I don't have a car and don't have anybody to take me to the ER. Ambulance gets there and they won't take me as they say I'm not an emergency as I can still breathe and my heart is beating just fine. Right after the ambulance refuses to take me to the hospital, the oral surgeon calls me and tells me he called in a prescription for me for a suppository to keep me from vomiting. I decide to try and stick that out with that plan for the night since I couldn't get to the emergency room anyways. Didn't do shit. I'm at the point by the time Norm gets home from work the next day where I'm not moving and just delirious in pain, constantly vomiting and dry-heaving if I can't vomit. By this time also, the entire right side of my face in addition to my throat is completely swollen and blown up so I finally get taken to the hospital.
I tell you it took a week's worth of two different anti-biotics pumping into an IV at once in addition to two surgeries to get over the infection that had spread from where the bone had been sawed off in my jaw down to my neck and throat. Had the infection spread anymore, it would have been fatal considering it had either my heart and lungs or brain to go to.
So what did I learn from all of this? First of all if you plan on doing any type of surgery period, prescribe fucking anti-biotics. The oral surgeon that took my wisdom teeth should have had me on them before he even took those teeth out. Second, 9-11 doesn't work unless you're having a heart or asthma attack evidently. Third, I need a car for emergencies. (Isn't that a given?) Fourth, practicality needs to be shot in the head sometimes. I love Norm, I understood why he kept going to work and encouraging me to go to the dentist instead of the ER, but it almost damn well cost me my life. I'm bitter about that, not that I'm bitter at him but it seems shitty that the wiser path is the more fatal one in this case.
So there, in a nutshell, is the two weeks worth of hell I just went through.
The philosophical implications are a bit more fun. First of all I find myself examining practicality more and more. It seems that in most cases practicality is usually a wise attitude to have. After all, impulse decisions more often than not get you into trouble. This whole experience however has me hating practicality. It's not just the almost dying thing that gets me, there's other aspects of it as well. For instance, I'm at the point where I'm ready to settle down, get married, have kids. Norm? Well it's not practical to. We have bills we have to pay off first of all, then savings we have to set aside. A wedding's going to cost so much money...He thinks getting married would 'ruin a good thing' and that having pets is more practical and akin enough to having kids. For vacation and getting away from it all, sitting at home playing video games is the practical, cheap answer to entertainment. Here also, because I have a good guy that takes care of me, financially helps me out, doesn't treat me badly, it's 'practical' to stay with him even though we want to the relationship to evolve or not evolve in our own ways.
As you can see, I'm frustrated with such practicality. It's dry, it's hollow, it almost killed me and it's leeching every last bit of romance out of my relationship. I don't want to have to sit in a hospital bed crying because I'm not sure whether or not I'm going to live to see the next day and despising the fear and uncertainty of the agnosticism I've always embraced. I don't want to be a slave to bills, living on their whims and their whims alone. I don't want some hollow damn existence where all I fucking do is work, play games, avoid making love to my partner because I'm 'not in the mood', rinse, repeat, with nothing to leave behind of myself except copies saved of all the bills I've had and payments I've made.
So moving forward after my near-death experience I've determined what it is I definitely want with life:
I want to write books. That can easily be arrange in my spare time, I still need a damn netbook to be able to do it. Reasoning, I want to leave my mark on the world. I don't want in the end my life's legacy to be the sum of what you can find based on my social security number, rather I want something tangible. I don't understand why people don't get that and think I'm aiming outrageously high.
I want to get married and know I have a solid relationship. I don't just want to be someone's financial partner and buddy to mess around with, I want to know that I'm truly loved and wanted for the rest of my life, that they're connected to me on every level there is to be connected to me on.
I want to start attending a Buddhist Temple. Yes, yes, I know I've always been agnostic, but after years of thinking Buddhism is the one religion I can actually follow considering it's more philosophy than dogma. After almost dying, I realize that I need more spirituality in my life and for me, Buddhism is the path to go.
I want a child. I have no rational explanation for this one but neither does anyone else really. What's wrong with that?
I also need a car and a vacation but those should be easily acquired in the next year, well at least the first one should be.
My biggest fear is that Norm won't be willing to change and won't work with me. I love him to death, I really do, (I love his family to death too) but I don't know what I'll do if he won't meet with me here. I don't think he takes me seriously either, that he views me as more of a teenager. I know it's a problem that I have, that I always assume I mean less to people than I actually do or constantly assume people think little of me, but hell what grounds have I ever had for anyone to take me seriously until recently? It seems shitty though. Here I am, I'm ready and willing to change and shape the course of the rest of my life and it seems more and more like it's coming down to having a talk with Norm. Either he'll work with me and we go forward, I have to break up with him and start anew, or I just do what I've done for years, accept what I have and be damn thankful I get at least that.
I hate fucking life, even if I cling so hard to it and am thankful to have it.