The wisdom teeth, all four of them, are officially out. In the days and weeks leading up to this exciting and wonderful event, numerous people told me how it'd be. A lot of their stories took this form:
Helpful Person 1: Oh, it's not bad at all. They dope you up, they give you great painkillers, no problem.
Helpful Person 2: Yeah, the painkillers are great, it's gonna go fine. Although sometimes they do make you nauseous. I threw up one time, and it got in my sockets, but really, no problem.
HP1: Ohhh, yeah. Vomit in the sockets hurts pretty bad. I had that too, and it felt like my mouth was being raped by wolverines.
HP2: Dude, for sure. It'd have been worse, except my whole lower lip and chin were numb for three months. But that went away.
HP1: Jeez, I wish mine had been numb, cause the surgeon had accidentally cut up the inside of my lower lip real bad. That hurt almost as bad as the surgery itself.
HP2: Tell me about it... But really, when you go back in for the checkup, that's the bad part. They start rooting around in the holes with some sorta metal prybar. I damn near fainted from the pain.
HP1: Huh, they didn't do that for me... They just smashed me in the face with a frying pan, that knocked me out cold. I woke up in the parking lot with no pants on. That didn't happen to you?
HP2: Oh no, but I had mine out in '92, they only started the frying pan smashing pretty recently. They just held me down and sodomized me in the office instead.
HP1: Oh, cool, didn't know that.
HP2: Yeah. Well, anway, dude, it's no problem. Piece of cake, you won't feel a thing.
Needless to say, people are very, very helpful. Regardless, I think that of all the versions of reality that people gave me, the actual winner is Ian Hogan. His story was the “long blackout period, leading into relative comfort,” and was accurate for me, even to the point that I apparently also woke up out of sedation, and thought they hadn't yet done the work, and insisted they did. It seemed really stupid when Ian said he did it, but apparently, in my medication induced wisdom, I reached the exact same conclusion.
So, here's the summary so far: I went to the place, they put me in a room, on a bed sorta deal. They took my blood pressure, and dicked around a bit longer than I'd have liked. Then the doctor showed up, put some sort of IV holding rig on my right arm, hooked up the IV (which I barely felt), and then starts talking to me about my wedding ring. It's titanium, doctor. It took no more than 1 minute before I was in full blackout mode. That ended, I guess maybe two hours later, when I was laying on the couch at home. Apparently I did all manner of silly crap during that timespan, such as get my wisdom teeth removed, ride around in a wheelchair, insist I was somewhat awake during the procedure, tell them to actually remove my wisdom teeth, blather about a dream I had the night before, and generally talk about nothing.
Once home, I layed on the couch for a while, and noticed that nothing really hurt all that much, that my lip and chin were numb, and that I generally felt pretty psyched about myself. While it was on the couch that full blackout mode ended, I was still somewhat spotty after that. For example, Hussain came over, and I talked about Rush Limbaugh with him, but I don't recal that. I do recall that Munk was somehow being mean to me, forcing me to run around in the yard without a shirt on. When she threatened to call Dan over to make me stop, I called him up and said something, but I don't really know what. I tried to do a little painting, which went fine, except that I couldn't focus very well.
Then I went to bed. It was probably while I was sleeping that I should have taken some of my painkillers, but I'm sorta scared of them, because one time I took them and they made me feel psychotically angry for about 8 hours. Not taking them was a mistake. It led to a very, very high level of discomfort. I am supposed to wash my mouth out with salt water from time to time, and after one of these sessions, I started hurting in a way that I was not at all psyched about. It was fairly impressively bad. I took pain pills at that point, an in about two hours everything was pretty good again, to the point that I pretty much can't feel any discomfort at all right now.
The only problem right now, is that I feel pretty badly like I'm going to hurl right now. This is definitely not a good thing, but I have some pills for nausea too, so I think I'll take one of those and lay down again.