You have to wonder during what stage of our evolutionary process that we developed wisdom teeth--or better yet, why we still have them. In terms of teeth they are entirely unnecessary. When was the last time you chewed anything that far back in your mouth?

Far from being useful add-ons to your dental arsenal, they're quite detrimental to your health--leading to everything from crowding to infections, depending on just how horribly askew they emerge from your jaw. Thus it has become standard practice to have them removed.

I put off having my wisdom teeth removed for as long as I could manage. For at least two years my dentist would mention having them removed every time I paid him a visit for a cleaning. They weren't giving me any problems so I couldn't see the point in having them yanked. But then I started going to college on the other side of the country, and I feared what could go wrong should any one of them start causing problems while I was away. I made an appointment to have them looked at by an oral surgeon, and then booked an appointment to have them removed.

Standard procedure, I was told. You walk into the office with them, and when you wake up from the anesthesia they're gone. Oh sure, there are some little things that have to be adhered to. No food or drink eight hours before the operation, only soft foods for a few days after, but nothing to be overly concerned about. Better to have them taken care of now before they have a chance to cause problems.

I walked into the oral surgeon's office optimistic about the whole thing. Didn't seem too bad, especially considering the alternative of taking the risk of having one of them create an infection later on in life. The nurses strapped me into a chair, the oral surgeon went over the procedure, asked me if I had any questions.

Nope, no questions. Let's get to this right away. No sense in wasting time.

They started me on an IV fluid drip, which I had once before when I was in the hospital for the stomach flu last December. From that all the drugs I needed would enter my body. "First, we're going to give you Robinul. This will dry up your secretion system," said the oral surgeon.

Okay. No problem. Don't feel anything yet.

"Next we're going to give you [insert long and complicated name of drug here], the newer, better valium. This will make you feel a little groggy."

Fair enough. Still don't feel a thing.

"All right, now we're going to give you the stuff that will put you to sleep."

"We're going to take good care of you," one of the nurses said to me. This was supposed to be reassuring, but it had the opposite effect. I had assumed they were going to take good care of me. Their insistence on telling me this verbally made me uneasy.

But that feeling of uneasiness was short-lived--the anesthesia hit me hard and fast. No need to count backwards from one hundred, which I had seen happen in sitcoms before. I was overcome with the urge to laugh as this drug attacked by my neurons, but I couldn't because a large, black cube of rubber had been placed in my mouth a few minutes earlier. The world went silent. Then black.

No weird anesthesia-induced dreams either. During the next two and half hours of the procedure my cognizant awareness of my existence was replaced by the equivalent of a black hole. I saw nothing, heard nothing, felt nothing, knew nothing. Pure emptiness.

The next thing I remember was waking up, my mouth completely numb, the oral surgeon informing me that my mouth was packed with gauze, in case I wasn't immediately aware of it. They gave me a set of instructions on what to do, some prescriptions to be filled, a bag full of extra gauze, and I (unwittingly) booked an appointment on Monday to have the sutures removed. (Thankfully I was also given an appointment card with the time written on it--otherwise I wouldn't have had the slightest clue as to what time I had scheduled.)

When the subject of having my wisdom teeth removed what no one told me was how much of an ordeal it was for the first day. Gauze in my mouth had to be replaced every forty minutes in order to help stem the bleeding. I'm not the kind of person who has an aversion to bleeding--except when it comes from somewhere that I can't see. I hate nosebleeds because I can't tell when the bleeding has stopped, how well it has healed, how careful I should be. If you get a cut on any external part of the body you can wash it, bandage it, monitor its progress, know when it has fully healed and when it hasn't.

You can't do that when the bleeding is coming from your nose or your mouth. The fact that my printed instructions told me the bleeding wasn't going to taper off until that night only made me more nervous.

Then there was the numbness. I couldn't take any of my newly acquired medications (a total of five of them--two for pain, two for antibiotics, one for anti-swelling) until the numbness wore off. This was supposed to happen in six hours, but it didn't. Not until a full eleven hours after the procedure did it begin to ebb away. Worse still, the numbness persisted only in my chin, lower lip, and tongue. Where my wisdom teeth had formally presided the numbness went away after the standard six hours. For five hours then I had the persistent pain coming from the back of my mouth while being unable to do anything about it because the front of my mouth was still numb.

Forget drinking anything for those eleven hours either--not while that lower lip is still numb. In our everyday life we underestimate the usefulness of the lower lip in helping us drink. If it's numb you can't feel the sensation of the glass against it or the liquid passing from the glass to your mouth. If you try to drink anything you inevitably wind up getting it all over yourself.

As the night started to drag on I couldn't think of anything but how miserable of a condition I was in; numb, bleeding, unable to eat, drink, or even speak coherently.

Finally, as the hour crawled to 1:30am, the numbness began to dissipate from my lower lip and I could drink and take the badly needed painkillers.

Since then I've been doing much better. I've been taking all of my prescriptions at their assigned times. I can eat soft foods and drink without a problem. My jaw is still noticeably sore whenever I try to chew or talk, but I'm managing. In the meantime I'm spending some of the last few days of my summer vacation just trying to cope with my mouth being in the state that it is.

I would be sad about this but I'm on oxycodone, and there is no such thing as sadness when you're on oxycodone.