TGWTG User Blogs

Personally, I've never been a big fan of teeth. Of all of God's creations, teeth are one of humankind's biggest pains in the ass. Sure, they're nice for chomping food an all, but at the expense of toothaches, cavities, overbites, underbites, gaps, rot, root canals, fillings, crowns, and thousands of dollars worth of professional dental work. As useful as they are, they're simply annoying. 

But wisdom teeth pile up on top of the shit-cake that teeth can be. They literally do nothing but take up space. The sit underneath your gums in the back of your teeth and do nothing but cause problems. I wouldn't mind them if they were more like actual molars and did stuff like chew food, but for most people, their wisdom teeth never even see the light of day. So what's the point of having them? When humans came into being, was that just thrown in as an extra gag, just to piss us off? They are literally nothing but a nuisance for later-life.

If you're between the ages of 14 and 25, chances are that you've probably had your wisdom teeth removed, myself included. And of all of the people who have, I'm willing to bet that 100% of you agree with me that it totally sucks. Ass. Anyone who has had teeth removed knows that it's a fairly simple process, and you're more or less over it in a day or two (that is after you've gotten the feeling back in your jaw once the novocaine wears off). Really, the most you'll need to do is eat soft foods for two to three days tops before working your way back to regular food and pop a couple Advil when your mouth starts to hurt (I can't remember if vicodin is part of the plan, but if it is, I don't imagine it's a heavy dose). If all goes well, you should feel fine in a couple of days.

But your wisdom teeth, ooooooooooohh no. That's a very different process. A VERY different process. Personally, I would be able to put up with wisdom teeth if it weren't for this one aspect of them, and what sucks is that it's practically inevitable that you'll have them removed at some point. Oh boy, where do I even begin? I guess it's best to start right from the beginning of the procedure. Anyone who's had teeth pulled knows the general procedure. You go in and take a seat in the dentist chair, the assistants place a nozzle over your nose and turn on the nitrous oxide (laughing gas, for the idiots who don't know what that is), you start to feel the high from that, the dentist gives you a shot of novocaine in the gum (probably the worst part of the procedure), then they go to work while you barely feel a thing (except the feeling that your lower jaw has extended twice the size of Bruce Campbell's chin). And that's about it. But wisdom teeth, they go the whole nine yards for that.

So, you take a seat in your chair, ready for the extraction, and what's the first thing they do? They put you on a heart monitor. That's right. A fucking heart monitor. They put that plastic thing on your index finger you see in hospitals and hook that up to the beeping heart rate machine. The green, spiking line and all. Say, thanks for the immediate confidence booster, assholes! I thought I was having teeth removed, not enduring open-heart surgery! And that's the first damn thing they do, those pricks. "Don't worry, Billy, everything's going to be fine. We're just going to hook you up to this monitor on the off-chance we fuck up somehow and you begin to go into shock. This doesn't normally happen, but we just want to be sure!" There's strike one.

Now, my memory of the next few steps is somewhat hazy, which ironically leads us into the next part of the pre-procedure. Instead of giving you the gas from last time, many people are commonly put unconscious via a liquid valium drip inserted intravenously. Thinking on it, this really isn't a bad idea, because the last thing I want is to be awake during this thing (I'll touch on that later). However, once you're put under, you don't fully come out of it until about an hour or so afterwords, so many dentists recommend calling a taxi for yourself or having a friend or relative drive you instead of driving yourself. Personally, I remember walking into the office, sitting down in the chair, having the heart monitor put on me, them putting some device in my mouth that would keep it open, then a few vague images of me leaving the office through the back door and most of the car ride home before I finally re-entered the world once more.

I've never seen what my mouth looks like during an oral procedure, so I can only guess what it's like when you have an oral extraction. Plus, the nitrous oxide sort of prevented me from knowing exactly what everything felt like, but my best assumption is that a basic oral extraction is nothing more than pulling your tooth out. I never recall my dentists using anything sharp or a device that would translate them to cutting up my mouth to get a tooth out. However, since your wisdom teeth sit underneath your gums in the back of your mouth, having to cut into your gums in inevitable. So getting your wisdom teeth out barely qualifies as an getting your teeth pulled, it's pretty much a low-grade surgery. It's really no wonder they put you under during this, because I sure as hell wouldn't want to feel them cutting into my gums and then pull a tooth from the wound, laughing gas or not. When everything is done, they stitch up your gums with a dissolvable type of stitch, which is convenient because it means you don't need to have them removed in another appointment, but they're really annoying and brush against your tongue from time to time.

Those who have had experience with novocaine in their gums know that it's a bitch to deal with. If you take your hand and hold it in front of your face by about a foot, that will give you a good rough estimate of where you think your jaw extends to when numb on novocaine. I so intensely dislike putting up with novocaine immediately after a dental procedure. You can't talk, you tend to drool on yourself, and when you try to eat, it slobbers all over you and you just look like an idiot. It's bad. But as if that weren't bad enough, the effects of the vicodin you take on that first day is. I only took vicodin the first day because I apparently had a rather speedy recovery, but that first day was just...wow. From what I recall, I was laying in bed in my room I think around 10 or 11 at night completely stoned on vicodin watching The Ten Commandments on TV. It was really, really weird. Some of you might be intrigued by the prospect of being "stoned" on vicodin, but trust me, it's really not that cool (especially after having anywhere from 2 to 4 teeth cut out of your gums).

All of this for a couple pairs of teeth that you have never used before. They're like an dormant volcano, waiting under the surface until their time comes and then all hell breaks loose. It's insanity. Wisdom teeth have almost no function, and they don't even come in until you're a teenager. So why the hell are they called "wisdom teeth?" If anything, they don't even last long enough in your mouth to have any experience with the basic function of being a tooth since they generally never see a morsel of food ever. So really, they have no wisdom to pass along at all, since they've never chewed anything in their short life EVER. Wisdom teeth rank among humanity's largest pains in the ass, and when the time comes for their extraction, major pains in the mouth.

...I apologize for that last little pun. That was just really bad

Wisdom teeth: 1.5/10