Well, that was easy

On March 15, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn life3 Comments

090819164319_1_540x360 — Pictured: not my tooth

The tooth extraction has basically turned out to be nothing worth talking about, honestly, which isn’t going to stop me from devoting an entire blog post to it. The most complicated part was convincing the … nurse? not-the-dentist-but-not-clearly-a-hygienist? Dental assistant? I dunno, the lady who wasn’t the dentist– that while I appreciated the offer of sunglasses and would happily wear them during the procedure, the idea that the television in the room should be tuned to my needs (“Christ, no, not the news, anything but that”) or that the in-room bluetooth should be playing my own personal pullin’-teeth playlist was utterly unnecessary. The TV doesn’t even have to be on, and if it’s going to be on my only condition is that it be either not turned to a channel that’s going to provoke rage or muted. I really don’t need music.

She really had trouble with this idea. Apparently it’s rare that patients for extractions don’t have media demands while going through the procedure. Personally, I don’t get it.

Anyway, the nurse smeared my tongue and the area of the tooth with some sort of numbing gel and left me alone for a few minutes and then the dentist came in. We talked about Hamilton for a few minutes and then he did … something inside my mouth for maybe a minute and said “Okay, all done!” and left.

I was surprised to learn that a tooth extraction takes less than a minute; I hadn’t felt a damned thing. I expressed my surprise (“Holy shit, that’s it?”) and then discovered that, no, he hadn’t even touched the tooth, I’d just received three numbing shots to complement the numbing gel; the various non-dentists in the room were vastly entertained by my theory that the dentist declaring “all done” meant that “all” was “done” and that I could go home.

It was not, and I could not.

That said, the actual extraction took maybe five minutes. He warned me beforehand that he suspected he might have to break the tooth to get it all out; as it was maybe 97% of it came right out and then he had to do a touch more fiddling around to get a tiny piece of root that stayed behind. There was no pain whatsoever. There wasn’t even any real sense of pressure or discomfort or even tugging. If he hadn’t shown me the tooth I don’t know that I’d have believed he removed it, since I couldn’t feel anything inside my mouth– it was hours before I could actually feel the hole the tooth left behind with my tongue. My appointment was at 10:00 and I was texting my wife that I was finished at 10:30.

Several hours of lazing about the house and occasionally switching out my gauze ensued; as of this moment the extraction was ten and a half hours ago and while it’s been a bit obnoxious I still can’t say that I’ve felt any actual pain at any point. I ate ice cream and applesauce and had macaroni and cheese for dinner. I’m going to take some painkillers before bed strictly as prophylaxis but I’m not sure I really need them.

So, yeah. Kinda feel like an idiot that that had me more nervous than my gallbladder surgery did ten years ago. I mean, shit still has time to go south if I lose the blood clot or something, but so far this has been cake.

In which I annoy a medical professional

On March 1, 2018March 1, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy10 Comments

Carie_0fada0_3648754 So. Uh. Oops?

You may recall my misadventures in corn chippery over the weekend. The doctor at the ER who checked me out said she thought my tooth might be cracked, so I made an appointment with an actual dentist like a big boy to have it looked at. Now, this person is “my dentist” in the sense that ten years ago when the exact same thing happened to me (possibly not involving corn chips) his office was the one I went to. I’m not afraid of the dentist, I swear, I just … don’t prioritize it? So the last time I was in there was the last time I was in there.

Anyway, what I figured would happen was that they’d look at the tooth, do some X-rays, maybe a cleaning, and then make a recommendation for what to do about the tooth in the longer term. And if they tell me that the tooth needs to come out, so be it. I’m grown, I can handle a little tooth pull. It’ll be fine.

So. Dental assistant gently chided me for the length of time in between visits (fair) inspected my teeth (expected) took some X-rays (still following the script) and then called the dentist in, and then the whole damn thing went sideways.

“So, we’re gonna take that out today,” is how he started the conversation.

“Uh,” I said. “Today?”

“Right now,” he said, gesturing at a pile of tools behind him.

“About that,” I say, realizing that in a very real way my entire life has been leading up to the next three sentences that are about to come out of my mouth, “It’s my 10th anniversary? And I have reservations at an expensive steakhouse and tickets to Hamilton tonight? I am not throwing away my shot.”

And of course neither of them get it.

“What are you saying?” he asks.

“We are not going to be pulling any of my teeth today. I intend to be eating a large steak in about eight hours. I’ll make an appointment for next week.”

… it didn’t go over well.

So, serious question: I had not for a single second anticipated the possibility that absent an imminent dental emergency they were going to just go and yank a tooth out of my mouth on no notice. All of my training with medical procedures for my entire life has led me to believe that this is the decision flowchart:

Make medical appointment to discuss/diagnose problem.
Are you dying or in danger of imminent death? If yes, go to 4. If not, go to 3.
Make second appointment sometime in the future to remedy problem.
Do surgery, or radiation, or whatever.

So apparently I need to add a 2a, which reads are we gonna pull a tooth? and if the answer is yes you also go to 4.

Anyway, I stuck to my guns– turns out it’s awfully hard to convince me to let you yank a tooth out of my mouth if I didn’t wake up today prepared for tooth extraction and have very expensive uncancellable plans that will be totally screwed up if you try to pull my teeth– and now I have an appointment next Thursday for a tooth extraction.

Which I’m sure will be all sorts of fun and generate at least one more blog post.

(Please, somebody, speak up in comments and tell me if I should have been expecting this– because I literally hadn’t even considered the idea that they’d go straight to an extraction without specifically scheduling it. Am I nuts?)

Hold my beer and watch this

On February 25, 2018February 25, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

002012107-1 So I think I found the dumbest possible way to end up in the ER, guys, for serious.

Friday afternoon I found myself craving both corn chips and queso and potato chips and French onion dip at the same time. I texted my wife and requested that she obtain at least one of those two pairs of things on her way home from work. My wife, being wonderful, came home with both sets.

“OM NOM NOM,” I replied, and I had me some corn chips and some queso. And a piece of chip promptly got stuck in one of my wisdom smilebones. While this was an unwelcome development, it wasn’t the end of the world or anything. I dislodged it after probably less than a minute, had a few more chips, then decided it was a touch more hurty than such things usually are and discontinued my chip-eating.

The next morning my goddamn jaw still hurt. Still hurt a lot, actually; quite a bit more than it had the night before, and with a touch of dizziness and lightheadedness (are those the same thing?) to boot. I went to work anyway, of course, because driving when you’re dizzy is what you do when you’ve already made one stupid mistake in the last couple of days. I did not last at work, however, as the pain intensified and I decided after about an hour that spending all day 1) on my feet and 2) talking to people was not what I wanted to do. So I left work early and came home.

I spent the whole day fighting with myself about whether I was going to urgent care or not– it was Saturday, after all, so a regular doctor was out of the question– and finally decided I needed to go around dinnertime. By that point I was assuming I had some sort of quick-onset jaw infection. It wasn’t the first time that this had happened to me and the pain felt pretty familiar from the last time . So, fine: off to urgent care, where they’ll give me a scrip for an antibiotic and probably some sort of painkiller and then I’m home free.

Hah. First of all, there was only one urgent care center anywhere near me that was still open. Second, they refused to treat me, since jaw pain is “dental-adjacent” and as the lady behind the desk very apologetically explained, they were administratively banned from dealing with anything “dental-adjacent.”

Here is a list of dental urgent care centers. They are all closed on weekends. Which violates my understanding of the meaning of the phrase “urgent care,” but whatfuckinever I don’t have the energy for this fight right now.

I contemplate the idea of being in this much pain until Monday and have to fight off tears in public, because shit’s getting worse.

“Do I have any options here?”

“The ER.”

No. I’m not going to the goddamn ER for jaw pain that I created by eating corn chips. The ER is where you go when you get shot, or when you’re so sick that you literally don’t know what else to do. I need a simple goddamn antibiotic and a pain pill. There’s seriously nobody who can do that for me?

I went home. I told my wife what had happened. And she pointed out that my options were basically 1) Go to the ER now, or 2) go to the ER at 3:00 in the fucking morning once I entirely lost the ability to handle my shit.

Which is the story of how I spent my Saturday night– part of it, at least– in the emergency room, apologizing to nurses for wasting their (very efficient, it must be said) time. And I left (quickly!) with an antibiotic and instructions to see a dentist ASAP for a tooth that the doctor thought miiiiight be cracked and a scrip for a much stronger painkiller than I’d expected, and instructions that if at all possible I wasn’t to drive while on it and that it therefore would be best to not go to work the next day either.

Which is why it took until 8:30 tonight for me to write about any of this, because I’ve kinda been in a bit of a haze.

Because of corn chips.

The end.

IDIOTIC POSTSCRIPT: Despite all this I am literally at this very second considering finishing off the queso. I might have to use a spoon, though.

In which I ain’t right

On September 14, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn life4 Comments

Chances are if you’re reading this you’re not a doctor, since most people aren’t, but I bet you can look at my x-rays there and pick out at least one thing wrong: that being that my kneecaps are in the wrong place, and pointed in the wrong directions. As it turns out, my femurs are rotated a bit to the outside, and then my tibias are rotated a bit to the outside more, thus resulting in my fucked-up feet that point outside instead of straight ahead like they ought to. My knees apparently hinge properly, and while there’s apparently a bit of wear where there ought not to be I’m not in danger of the damn things falling apart on me anytime soon. Basically I have some deformities (the doctor used the word “deformities” a lot) and that’s about it.

Solutions are as follows: surgery, which would be stupid, cortisol shots followed by knee braces followed by some physical therapy, which would likely be long and fairly pointless, or I could just be less of a fatty fat-fat and lose some weight.

The doctor didn’t quite say “fatty fat-fat,” but he made sure I heard it. Also, I only know the things I talk about up there because he was busy explaining them to the med student he had in the room with us. He barely talked to me at all. Like, the whole conversation was third-person.

I’m kinda tired of dickish doctors right now.

My new book, Tales: The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 3 is now available for pre-order on Amazon! Just $2.99 for the ebook edition!

Well, that’s new

On September 1, 2017September 1, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn life10 Comments

13-5 I did, in fact, manage to make it through my doctor’s visit yesterday without any invasive examinations, which I mostly wasn’t super interested in anyway. The part of me that was super interested was the bit that writes blog posts, though.

I discovered a new way that the world can degrade me today, though: I needed to visit the doctor mostly because she needed to re-up my refills for my blood pressure medicine, and she insists on twice-yearly checkups for anyone on maintenance meds, which I’m okay with in principle. The real reason, on my end at least, was that I’ve decided it’s time to start moving toward getting robot parts, and I need referrals for that. My knees are fucked up, guys, and fucked up in a way that manifests itself by my feet sticking out in directions that feet are not supposed to point while I’m walking. As you all know, because I gripe about it all the fucking time, I have three eleven-hour shifts a week at my job in addition to the two six-hour shifts, and at the end of those shifts I have to drive home. By the time I get home, half an hour or so later, my joints have locked themselves up so thoroughly that I can barely walk. I occasionally wonder whether the neighbor kids have made a sport of being by the windows when I get home from work so that they can watch me hobble down my long-ass driveway to check the mail. I’m fat, yes, but there are tons of people way fatter than me and my mobility issues are, I think, at the very least at the long end of the tail for people my size.

So, yeah: can I have a referral to an orthopedist, please? Or whatever a knee doctor is called, because I always feel like the word is the wrong word even if I’ve just looked it up to check? And most of the time I want the word “osteopath,” but I’m pretty sure osteopathy is voodoo, even if I like to say the word better?

Sure, patient, you can have an orthopedist. Which one?

(As an aside, the horrified look on both my doctor and the types-rapidly-on-the-laptop person who always seems to come into the room with the doctor nowadays when they really looked at my feet for the first time was hilarious.)

Well, my mom liked this one dude who replaced her knee. Can I use him?

Sure!

And then I wait a day, and then the degradation happens. Get this: I got a call from my doctor’s office today, from the incredibly apologetic person who drew the short stick and had to make this call, and get this: this orthopedist who I specifically requested said that he was not willing to treat me because I’m too fat. As in, I’m not allowed to even darken his fucking door. Not “you’ll need to lose weight before we do knee replacement surgery.” I’m not even at “you need knee replacement surgery” right now despite all the jokes about robot parts. I want a medical professional to tell me what to do about my knees, and yes, I’m fully expecting to hear “losing weight will help,” and yes, it will, but it will not solve the problem that my feet point the wrong fucking direction, and that’s not because I’m fat, even though the fatness makes the pain and stress on my knees worse. But maybe I don’t need new knees! Maybe I can just wear a brace or something! I don’t know, that’s why I need a doctor!

But no. He won’t even see me, because my BMI is too high. What’s my BMI? I dunno, but it’s apparently over 40, because he flat-out refuses to see any patients with a BMI of 40 or above. Ever.

So fuck that guy, gimme an appointment with someone who isn’t a dickhead.

(Which, by the way, I just GISed “40 BMI”? And holy shit I do not look like this:

BMI-Infographic-1 Anybody with the profile of the King Kong Bundy-lookin’ motherfucker on the right there has got to be pushing 500 pounds, if not more. I’m 5’10” and just over 300, which, granted, is probably the heaviest I’ve ever been, but my profile matches the gray one in the middle much more than either of the other two. Holy shit.)

Anyway, here’s to hoping that my new doctor isn’t an asshole, and can fix my stupid knees and my stupid obtuse-angled feet, and fuck that other guy.

On low standards

On August 30, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

I will consider tomorrow a success if I get through it without a prostate exam.

You may go about your evening.

May as well tell the whole world

On May 21, 2017May 21, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy11 Comments

tmi.png.html I thought, for reasons that will quickly become quite obvious, that maybe I ought to not go ahead and fill the Internet in on certain recent developments in my life. But I’ve been pretty open about being on anxiety medication since they put me on it, and this is related to that, so to hell with it. A warning: if you know me personally, it’s possible that you might not want to read this. Certain of you I’m giving license to never ever stop mocking me again, which… eh. It’ll be okay.

So, to get straight to the point: I’ve taken myself off of Lexapro. If I were a more intelligent human I would probably be weaning myself off Lexapro, but I’m not an especially intelligent human and I was on a pretty low dose to begin with so I’m cold-turkeying the shit. I had several reasons for making this decision. One of the big ones was that I’m not in the environment (teaching) that led me to need Lexapro in the first place, so the direct cause of my anxiety issues is gone. The biggest one, though? It turns out that one of the rarer side effects of drugs like Lexapro is…

…this is the part where you stop reading, if you ever want to not think of this when you see me or talk to me again…

…urinary incontinence.

I have had, perhaps once a month in the past six months, what I will describe as a “bloop” and assume that your imagination can fill in the details. They have always happened when I was asleep, always when I was on my back, and have always instantly awakened me, at which time I’ve cleaned myself up, swearing profusely under my breath, and gone back to sleep. Last week, it happened twice in two days, and what was previously merely an excessively irritating thing that I was attributing to getting older abruptly had me Googling things like “prostate cancer.” There’s never been an issue when I was awake, although I feel like I’ve been having to race to the bathroom more urgently in the last year than I had previously.

Now, it’s a rare side effect. But I was seriously considering calling a doctor and scheduling a prostate exam, and if I can just go off a drug I already don’t want to be on rather than enduring a prostate exam, I think maybe I’ll try that first.(*)

So I did a couple things: I stopped taking my Lexapro and also stopped drinking pop, since caffeine and sugar have also been linked to urinary incontinence. Not only have I had no nocturnal issues since then, but I’ve slept through the night most of the nights since then. It has been months since I slept through the night five nights in a row; waking up at 3:30 in the morning needing to take a piss five or six times a week was also something that I had previously attributed to getting older that may have been caused by the drugs. It’s only been a week, mind you, and until last week this was not a thing that happened frequently, but the absence of further bloops and being able to sleep through the night have me thinking I’m probably on to something.

Negative side effects of stopping Lexapro have been minimal; I was weirdly dizzy today and that’s been about it. I haven’t noticed the anxiety coming back, really; I did let everyone at work know that I was off my brain meds and that if they thought I was behaving strangely they needed to let me know right away. Predictably, this has led to every fucking interaction I have with anyone now involving someone accusing me of being overly emotional, because the people I work with are caring and serious grown-ups.

(*) The word first means “first,” not “only,” just to be clear. I have since discovered that they’re recommending annual prostate exams start at 40 now instead of 50, so I actually will be talking to my doctor about that soon, and I’m not as het up about the idea as most men seem to be. I’ll tell you about it if it’s a funny story, but I don’t expect it to be a big deal. Just be aware that I’m not ignoring it.

Just checking, pt. 2

On March 13, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn Work5 Comments

Occasionally I have reason to call customers that have been in my store but I haven’t actually sold something to. Sometimes it’s because they’ve asked me to keep an eye out for something for them and I’ve seen a piece I think they’ll like. Sometimes it’s because something they were thinking about buying has gone on sale and I’m hoping I can convince them to come in and buy.

Actually it’s pretty much just those two reasons.

So this guy came in two weekends ago with his two kids and his wife. He’d been in at least twice with one of the boys previously, and I’d talked to him both times pretty much by pure coincidence. He and his son picked out five thousand dollars worth of bedroom furniture. Five thousand dollars of fairly ridiculously ornate furniture.

For a fifteen-year-old. We’ll lay that aside for the moment.

At any rate, they didn’t buy. Dad said he’d be back “tomorrow” with cash and I sent them with a quote. And they didn’t show the next day, which isn’t entirely surprising. It happens. But I had his phone number, so when we had an “everything on sale” thing going this weekend I called him and let him know I could save him some money. Left a message. Today was the last day of that sale, so I thought I’d leave one more message for him.

He answered the phone. I said who I was and where I was from.

“I’m with a patient right now,” he said. “I’ll have to call you back.”

252-word leadup to this question: what the fuck kind of doctor keeps his cell phone on while he’s meeting with patients, much less answers it when he doesn’t recognize the number? Have any of you ever had a doctor answer a goddamn cell phone while you were with him? That’s fucked up, right? I’m not crazy here?

He didn’t call me back, by the way.