A Loss of Wisdom

In late 2025, I was told by my dear mother that I needed to go in for a consult with the local oral surgeon to check in on my wisdom teeth and see what shenanigans they might be getting up to. Now, my mom being a dental hygienist typically takes care of all my dental appointments, which I greatly appreciate. Knowing myself as someone who does not like my mouth to be excavated in, I would likely never go if it were up to me.

After I got off work the afternoon of December 19th, 2025 I headed to the oral surgeon’s office, where I would meet both my mom and younger brother Andrew. I had driven past the building many times in the past having grown up in the area. As I turned off the highway onto the off ramp, I could see one side of the building peeking out from some trees, the other sides nestled against a limestone cliff-side with a forest growing in the back. I pulled my car into the somewhat small lot and saw my mom’s jeep sitting there waiting for me, with Andrew in tow. We all got out and went in, the office smelling like that of a typical dentist (very clinical).

The interior was quite beautiful, with the check in/waiting room being all glass walled, with the exception being the side that housed the doors for going back to where the real dentists lived. There were new looking couches and plants scattered about the room, and a small TV playing a home renovation show. The front desk was entirely stone with a marble countertop and accent lighting shining down the front to illuminate the “Great River Oral Surgery” name attached to the front. My first thought as an official money miser was that they likely could have forgone the nice building for something more practical, but I suppose for some people that could have been a turn off to walk into a building comprised of concrete walls with no decorations.

After check in, we sat down to wait to be called back. For about five or so minutes, I got to watch the traffic whizzing by, with many people having just got off of work. Soon enough though, a nurse told us that all of us could come back with one of the nurses. We walked through a hardwood door, the center of it being a translucent window. Through that door, there was a small open room to the right where I was told they needed to get an updated X-ray of my mouth. I stood in the machine and bit down on whatever it was they put in my teeth, and the nurse hurried out of the room to start the machine. I wondered if they might have known something I didn’t, seemingly being so scared to be around the machine while it was running, but I suppose I’ll never know. I watched the machine spin around my head and after it was finished, the nurse re-entered the room. She then directed me down a somewhat long hallway to one of the rooms on the left. It was in this room that Andrew and I decided we had better figure out what all the buttons on the roll-able surgery bed were for. The whole bed could be lifted up and down as a whole with a small foot pedal that you “pumped” up, or let down by lifting slightly on the pedal. There were also buttons for leaning the bed backwards and forwards, and the whole bed could of course be moved about the room by unlocking the wheels. Although my mom was not too enthused that we had decided to play around with the equipment, we were now certified surgery bed experts, knowledge which is of course unobtainable elsewhere.

We heard a knock on the door, and promptly stopped our messing about with the bed as the doctor entered. He sat down on a stool, introduced himself, and began to look at Andrew’s X-rays first. Andrew had four wisdom teeth, and the doctor determined that it would be best to get them removed sooner than later, to avoid damage to other teeth. He explained that since the teeth were relatively straight, they should be a simple job to remove. I hoped that my extra teeth were behaving in there, and that I would get to leave the consult knowing that the teeth would erupt just fine and have plenty of space next to their brethren. Upon looking at my X-ray, he noted that I only had three wisdom teeth. At first, this was quite exciting to me, as I was pretty sure that would mean if the teeth did have to be removed, there would be less pain and suffering to go along with it. But, as things typically go at the dentist office, there was bad news that followed. He explained that since my third tooth was up in my gums quite a bit more than the other two (and attempting to burrow itself into my top rear molar) that he would have to “go digging” for that one. Now, I’m not sure if that was supposed to inspire confidence, but I can tell you it in fact, did not. As his work was finished, he left the room after a quick goodbye, and in came the financial lady.

Mrs. Financial, as she will be called, had come to talk numbers. She offered to have my mom leave the room if I did not want to share the cost of the upcoming surgery with her, but being as my mom was my benefactor for this whole ordeal, I quickly declined. While she was running the numbers with my mom (I did not want to cause myself great pain in knowing how much such a thing would cost), I continued my analysis of the room and it’s equipment, and decided many of the shelves and stands would have been much better purchased at Harbor Freight, as they likely costed a fortune just to have the medical seal of approval on them. Once the talk of finances was over between Mrs. Financial and my mom, she walked over to a computer in the corner of the room and began to discuss what dates would work best for the official removal to take place. After some discussion, we decided that the Monday starting spring break would be the most ideal, as to avoid having to catch up on class work. With that, the appointments had been made, and at this point I knew there was no turning back. I would have to face the first surgery I had ever gone though.

March 15th, 2026 – Last day of Freedom

As I knew the next week or so was going to involve an entire day of no eating foods I enjoyed, I made a plan with a couple of my friends to go to my favorite Mexican restaurant and get what the place calls the “Burrito Super Crazy.” This burrito may look daunting to some, but I had conquered it many times before and was confident I would do it again without issue. Sure enough, once the burrito came out I began to chow down. I hadn’t had it in quite some time, which made it all the more delicious and easy to finish. With the typical “I don’t know how you eat all that” comment from one of my friends after I had finished, I of course asked to finish her leftovers as well. Once those were safely stored away in my reserves, I decided I should probably saunter on over to the McDonalds next door and get myself an ice cream cone to top it all off. To my surprise, the ice cream cone was only 89 cents, something one doesn’t see much anymore in these trying times. After the feasting was complete, I headed back home to burn off some of those calories with a much needed hike through the woods. After a good hike and good meal, I prepared for bed, knowing this was the last time I’d get to sleep voluntarily before the docs drugged me up the next day.

March 16th, 2026 – 07:30:00 AM – Surgery

The day had come that I was pretty sure might be my last, and upon waking up, I was quite parched but forbidden from drinking any water. The fear of what was about to go down in my mouth hole had unusually not set in yet. As I got in my moms Jeep with my mom, dad, and Andrew, I noticed the blizzard that had started the night before and continued into the morning. Visibility was not great, and snow blanketed the roadways and yards. With my dad at the wheel driving a rear-wheel drive Jeep, he of course had to have some fun around some of the snowy corners, which my mom quickly put a stop to by requiring he switch it to four-wheel drive. As we drove down the snowy streets, I enjoyed thinking about what other adventurous activities could be done in the Jeep, knowing full well that being my moms, it would never see roads that weren’t paved. The first wave of fear swept through me as we came over a hill and the oral surgeon building came into sight. Although it looked no different before, seeing it with the thought that I would have to go in there and let a group of people pry around in my mouth was not something I liked to think about.

Check in went smoothly, as we had arrived 30 minutes before the time of the first surgery (Andrew had elected to go first). It was at this point I was unfortunately faced with glancing at the credit card reader as my mom paid for the operation. Mine was of course cheaper than Andrew’s being as I only had 3 teeth needing to be removed, which was pleasing to me, but at the same time a $1300 bill was quite a nauseating sight. As we waited in the front room similar to before, the fear had oddly enough mostly left me. Perhaps the modern well decorated office was good for something after all. It was not long before an assistant came to take Andrew back. He glanced at me with a nervous smile, and away he went to one of the back rooms. I was next, not 2 minutes later and was brought down the same long hallway, but this time into a room on the right side filled with much more equipment. The assistant told me I could keep my coat with me and hang it on the door, and I laughed to myself about the thought of the nurses struggling to put it back on for me while I was knocked out.

I laid down on the surgery table, and the assistant went to work attaching heart rate monitors to my chest, a blood oxygen monitor to my finger, and an air hose to my nose. She told me that during surgery they crank the air to the nose up somewhat, and in order to test her knowledge I asked if it was the concentration of oxygen or if it was the pressure that got increased. She told me she didn’t know, but was kind enough to show me by turning up the dial on the wall. As I had expected, it was just the pressure that changed. The assistant asked me if I wanted a blanket, which I had never had at a dentist office before, so I accepted. She came back about 5 seconds later with a blanket that, to my surprise, was almost hot with warmth. What service! The nurse entered the room in order to get the IV attached to my arm. She stated that she was my doctors nurse, so I of course had to ask if she was exclusive to that doctor or if she worked for any of the 4 or 5 doctors that worked there. She told me she primarily worked for the doctor I’d be seeing, but would sometimes fill in for the others, and had been hired by the company (with the doctors involvement in the interview process). Out came the needle from a sealed package, similar to that of a band-aid wrapper. The IV going in the vessel of my arm was something I had not had done since I got blood drawn in Kindergarten, was uncomfortable going in, and began to get more and more sore as it sat in my arm for longer.

After the assistant and nurse had left, my mom came in the room to visit with me. She told me that Andrew was not very enthused about getting hooked up to all of the devices to prepare for surgery, and that the heart rate monitors constant beeping especially annoyed him. It was at this point that I assumed Andrew had probably been knocked out by the anesthesia. This was somewhat confirmed by the drilling that could be heard from his room. For about 30 minutes, I conversed with my mom about things one might talk to their mom about, until the doctor came in the room along with his nurse.

I was very curious as to what anesthesia felt like, as this would be the first time I had experienced it firsthand. I had been told previously that it was like teleporting, and that there was sometimes a countdown that the doctors had you do. When the doctor turned on the IV for me, all he said was “I’m gonna turn this on now” with not much else. Initially, I didn’t feel anything, but very quickly I felt that something was running through me. I glanced at my heart rate on the monitor to see if I would remember it when I awoke, and the smell of the room oddly changed. When I’ve passed out in the past, I’ve had a very similar change of smell come over me, and although I’m not sure why, this was the same change. I remember wondering at this point how long it would be until I passed out, and then felt my eyes closing before it all went dark.

When I awoke, I had indeed teleported to a different room, but it wasn’t so much that I was confused on how I had gotten there, I instead just felt like I had woken up from a nap. My first drug-addled thought was that I should probably get up and go for a stroll. As I lay there, I noticed Andrew across the room and waved to him, and in response he waved back at me. I tried to take my phone out to get a picture of him, but a nurse promptly stopped me and said “no phones.” I can only assume this was because there was around 10 other people in the room according to Andrew’s account, as my bed was in a corner with no visibility to the rest of the room. Soon enough, a nurse came over and dropped one of the side rails down on my bed and told me I would sit up. I did so, with my feet dangling off the side of the bed, and then stood myself up. According to Andrew, two nurses, one with each of us, led us out the back door to my mom’s jeep that was waiting outside, and helped us get in. I myself remember getting into the Jeep, but not anything between standing up in the recovery room and getting to the car door.

Upon getting in the Jeep, my dad told me he had gotten me a present. “How exciting!” I thought. I looked to my left on the back seat to find a brown paper bag, with it’s top folded over so you couldn’t see inside. I grabbed it and moved it over to my lap, and opened it up to find some gaskets I had been needing for my mower engine rebuild I was working on. I thanked my dad and replaced the bag back to the middle of the seat. Although most parts of the drive home were hazy, I do remember my dad driving past the entrance to our neighborhood as he said he needed to test out how well mom’s jeep could do on the hilly sections of the still snow covered roads. Andrew was not impressed with this detour, as he wanted to go home and rest, but I was feeling oddly well and thought that this plan sounded like great fun. The rest of the drive was quite anticlimactic (I suppose the Jeep was in fact cut out for the snow after all), and soon enough we arrived home.

Recovery Week

The first week of recovery, and the only one I’ll go into detail about, was mostly just fine for me. Andrew had a slightly different experience, which he has kindly outlined in the section below this. The day I had gotten my teeth removed I felt perfectly well after the anesthesia had worn off, despite having some blood in my saliva for the rest of that day. Once the numbness had worn off, I felt as though I was ready to rock, and didn’t have any pain other than a slight soreness in my cheek where the stitches were poking. The rest of that day I proceeded to repair a pump control board for my parents’ whirlpool tub, and went to Menard’s and Lowe’s with my dad to pick up some hinges for the cabinet doors. The next couple days I was limited to eating yogurt, and I chose the plain Greek variety because of its good nutritional value compared to the other sugary yogurts. I didn’t have much desire to overeat like I normally do since there wasn’t much food I could eat that was especially delicious, which caused me to lose around 6 pounds. My mom had told me that the week may be filled with swollen cheeks and jaw, and so I took some ibuprofen for the first four days, as I was told this would help reduce swelling. As the week went on however, I never did get swollen as far as I could tell. On day four I did notice some slight bruises near my lower jaw, but still no pain. By the next weekend, some of the stitches had begun to dissolve, which meant my cheeks would finally get a break from the constant poking, and that food getting trapped back in the crevices of my mouth began to be less of an issue. After talking with Andrew, we discovered that the doctor had extracted his teeth from the top, whereas with mine he chose to enter through the sides near my cheeks. This meant that my brother had some craters where the wisdom teeth had been taken out, whereas I did not. By Sunday, I was back to eating mostly normal foods again with the exception of crunchy things like chips and nuts. During the week I had managed to keep busy, fixing my RC cars, my mower, and my car over the course of the week, and also got to relax and watch some TV shows since I had taken work off. Although I certainly could have went more places and got more done without getting my teeth pulled, I consider the whole experience to be a success, despite the lack of wisdom I now have.

Andrew’s Account

I had never been a morning person, but now I was awake sitting in my bed at 7 am on a snowy, cold Monday morning. It was supposed to be the first day of my Spring Break – a rest from the tortures I had been going through for the last 8 weeks at the torment camp known as Iowa State University – but now I was being jolted awake to attend something much, much worse: my wisdom teeth exhumation.  

Both my brother Keitan and I were to have our teeth removed on that frightful morning, and excitement was the last thing that I was feeling. We weren’t allowed to eat or drink anything within 8 hours of the procedure, so the horrors of that morning were heightened even further by an intense hunger radiating from my stomach. After groggily attiring myself and then stumbling my way upstairs and into the Jeep (where both my parents and my brother were waiting) I felt prepared. However, the instant we exited the garage, my day became even worse: it was snowing. Even though I was very, very nervous that we would not make it to my important appointment, about 20 minutes later we arrived at the grandest Grand River Medical Group, but only after my father had drifted around in the snow on the way there, of course. My family exited the vehicle, trudged our way into the building, and began checking in. My procedure was to be more expensive than my brother Keitan’s, as clearly my teeth must’ve been worth more. After checking in, we momentarily sat down in the waiting room, awaiting what was to come. In what felt like not even 5 minutes, a nurse appeared. I had, for some reason, chosen to have my operation done first, and so unfortunately it was me who was brought back first into one of their dark, depressing operating rooms. The nurse sat me onto the chair, demanded that I show her my veins, and then stabbed a sharp knife which she called an “IV” into my arm. Luckily, my mother was there to comfort me, but the beeping of the heart rate monitor and the pulsing pain of the thing in my arm began to set off panic in my brain. What if I died? What if they messed up my teeth? Is this going to hurt? Ugh, I really don’t want to do this. After my mother parted from the room, the doctor and his squad of cronies came rushing in. They acted as though I wasn’t even there, and my heart began to rush even faster. I was scared, but that’s when they injected the anesthesia and put me down.  

Fortunately, I woke up. I didn’t have my contacts in, so the world was blurry, my mouth was numb and swollen, and I could feel a slight touch of pain creeping in. Through my confusion, I could see my brother Keitan waving at me from across the room. I waved back, I think. After sitting in the recovery bed for a few minutes, the nurse told me that it was time for me to be set free. I haphazardly got up, stumbled a tad bit, and then made my way outside to the Jeep which was waiting in the snow for my brother and me. Due to the gauze stuff inside of my mouth, I couldn’t speak, but I was ready to go home. My parents knew that my brother and I were ready to go home, so they made a large detour to check out the house they were interested in buying and then went straight home. The moment I arrived home, the pain began to inundate me, and the numbness in my mouth began to subside. At first it wasn’t much, but after a few minutes, the pain became almost unbearable. With a weird, somewhat numb feeling engulfing my mouth, confusion infecting my brain from the lingering anesthesia, and shooting pain erupting from the former homes of my wisdom teeth, I cried out in agony. I needed drugs, and fast. After consuming maximum allowed amounts of all, I just had to wait. The pain was pulsing through me, and it felt as though my mouth was about to explode. I couldn’t take much more, and I wanted to die. However, after about another 30 minutes of waiting, the pain finally began to cede: the medication was working, which was a relief. The rest of that first day was pretty much a blur, but one thing I do remember is messaging a certain Ukrainian on the blessed Facebook Marketplace about the possible purchase of a vehicle. After another dose of drugs, my zombified self tumbled into my soft bed and quickly fell fast asleep.  

The next day, on Tuesday, I awoke to the harmonious chirping of birds outside my window and also excruciating pain emanating from my mouth. I crawled out of bed, got dressed, and then walked into the bathroom so that I could restore my hazy vision with a device known as contacts. For some reason, however, when I peered into the mirror, the face of a 400-pound man glared back. I did not remember consuming vast amounts of fat the day prior, so I was quite mortified. Clearly, this day was already off to a great start. Providentially, I had 500 mg of amoxicillin and 600 mg of ibuprofen awaiting me in the kitchen upstairs, so I quickly rushed to consume my hearty breakfast. (Do not fear, I also ate some yogurt and applesauce.) My mother informed me that she would be making a town run in which my sister Bryna would receive her braces, and also, more importantly, ice cream would be purchased afterwards. I decided to attend, as did Keitan, and we soon parted from the house. To sum things up, ice cream from the McDonalds establishment was consumed, Bryna reluctantly had her braces installed, and many, many containers of yogurt were obtained from Target. After making it back to our abode, I informed Keitan that we would be driving to Chicago today to engage in the purchase of a vehicle from a very highly regarded dealership who engaged in their business through Facebook Marketplace. Keitan is quite a good brother, and he fortunately obliged to my proposition. We departed in the Jetta wagon into the cloudy wonderland of Illinois, confidence and hope in our hearts, and yogurt and pills filling our travel bag. After the 2.5-hour drive had been completed, we finally arrived in Algonquin, IL. Our friendly salesman, валерия, met with us in the parking lot of his apartment complex, wearing his amazon warehouse outfit. As it had just been driven back from work, the deep-blue Prius was covered in road salt and dirt, but my was it beautiful. After quick greetings and conversation, Keitan began to inspect the vehicle. As all seemed to be in good health, we then took it on a short test drive to test its capabilities. All looked well, so we returned the parking lot, got into Keitan’s Jetta, and then followed mister валерия to his dealership which was about a 10 minute drive away. After walking into the small building, I was seated in a comfortable chair and began to fill out the paperwork with the kind women waiting inside. With the occasional Cyrillic conversation between the business owners and the sound of Keitan showing his newfound best friend валерия pictures of his cars, I handed the 8,347$ over and signed the vehicle’s title into my name. On the way home, I was sure to test the top end capabilities of my new license-plateless Prius, of which there were none. Keitan must have also tested the top end capabilities of his Jetta, somehow arriving home 20 minutes before me. I promptly made my way inside, took my pills to soothe the pain, and then went to sleep. An hour later, I awoke. I’m not sure if it was the excitement from my new car or the horrible pain I was experiencing, but something has caused me to wake from my slumber. I went to the couch upstairs so that I could sit by the fire and have the comfort of my mother nearby, and luckily I was able to fall asleep for the second time. Luckily, it was now the morning. Well, 3:30 am. I woke up again in pain, took some more pills, and then went back to sleep. At last, I was able to sleep soundly.  

Wednesday and Thursday were quite uneventful, other than Keitan taking many unfortunate pictures of my bloated face and bragging about his seemingly unaffected face. Friday included a failure to register my Prius due to the ghoulish residents of the courthouse and a hike filled with trespassing and exhaustion joined by Keitan and father. Saturday then featured the acquisition of new papers for my Prius and then multiple difficult hikes in Illinois with Keitan. The Prius, although still lacking license plates, was doing wonders by getting us 51 mpg over our eventful road trip. My story finishes on Sunday, today, and I feel blessed to say that, other than a very tight jaw, I feel much better. I still can’t eat normally, and it depresses me, but I am confident better days are to come. I may have lost wisdom, but at least I now have a Prius and an addiction to painkillers.  

THE END