You can have my stuff

Seriously, I’m dying. Y’all can have my stuff. I don’t care who gets what. Except that I want to be buried with my iPod shuffle and also that bracelet my girlfriend gave me this year. And I want to be buried in Homer the Odyssey, because I love that minivan with the red hot passion of a thousand suns.

Other than that, I don’t care. Take it. Mudwrestle for it. That’s right. Even my extensive collection of broken harp strings. They’re yours. Because where I’m going, I won’t need to be reminded about all the broken harp strings I need to replace before the new ones also break and leave me high and dry without a 0.028” blue string for that high ‘F’ that breaks so darned often.

It won’t matter.

Because I’m dying, and will never need to replace that freakin’ string again. It will pass to one of my daughters, I suppose. Or something. Whatever. I don’t care. Because I’m dying and have more important things to think about.

Well, actually I’m not dying. Or at least, I’m not dying any faster than I was last week.

I’m just not sure this is such a good thing, right at this exact moment.

I believe what I have here is something called dry socket. This condition occurs when instead of having a nice blood-clot “plug” to protect your ravaged bones, said bones are exposed to the air and whatever other fool thing you put into your mouth (like soda, rice, popcorn – the list goes on) and become rather annoyed about it because, being that they are BONES, they’d prefer to be safely ensconced within mile upon mile of nice, soft, bacteria-thwarting tissue.

The packing material the good dentist sewed over the hole in my jaw fell out less than 48 hours afterward, and it was about twelve hours after that that I became aware that, far from becoming “better”, my jaw was throbbing as if the world were ending and I could no longer eat anything that required even a little bit of light chewing.

Tomato soup, people. That’s what is on the menu right now. Tomato soup and ibuprofen. That’s it. Even the good drugs I insisted on getting can’t touch this (although they do make me more cheerful about being in pain). Fortunately (hmm, ok, I’m not entirely sure ‘fortunately’ is the word I really want here), my symptoms are not indicative of something requiring emergency morphine drip attention. It’s “just” the dry socket thing. Which will work itself out in time, but will feel a lot better after I see him on Tuesday and he can replace the packing material. Because he isn’t in the office until Tuesday. So this is the earliest I can see him.

**sigh**

Funny how something like 36 hours can seems so different depending on circumstances. If I had 36 hours to spend, say, in Hawaii, it wouldn’t be nearly enough. It would go by faster than a Thunderbird on maneuvers. So would 36 hours spent on a cruise ship, or at a spa resort, or in the Webs store.

But 36 hours to wait before I can see a dentist qualified to irrigate and repack my extracted molar?

Eternity.

Which is another word for ‘forever’.

And also possibly where I am going. You know. Eternal rest.

Seriously. I’m going to be the first person ever to have died of dry socket. MARK MY WORDS!

“Unfortunate but fairly common”, they said. “Oh, you poor thing – don’t worry, it won’t last forever”, they assured me. “Look honey, I hate to tell you this, but there’s really not a whole lot to be done about it – take your ibuprofen, we'll see you Tuesday, but really nothing but time will take care of the problem,” they sighed (with a touch of exasperation and probably wishing they hadn’t given me their home phone number).

Oh well. I’m going to bed, where I plan to lie awake all night comparing this to every other pain I’ve ever had in my life and perhaps crank calling my dentist.

“It’s 2:15 a.m., doc – do you know where your laughing gas is?!”

Yeah. I think he’s going to really, really regret giving me his home phone number…