It snowed briefly last night and this morning, but didn't stick around. I miss winter.
I was novocained for the first time on Thursday, completely by surprise. To me, when a dentist says he's going to seal up a divot on your molar, that means sealants, the gross-tasting stuff they paint on your teeth...instead, I get in the chair and suddenly there's a giant needled syringe in my mouth. The dentist saw my surprised terror and kept asking, as he continued to apply novocaine, "Are you all right?" ---a difficult question to answer, mostly because of the syringe in my mouth. Apparently to get the best bonding of this divot he needed to drill into the tooth a bit, which I guess requires novocaine? I have never been numbed in my mouth before, and the sensation was frightening. I knew my face and my lips were still there, but something was terribly wrong. I could look at myself in the mirror and touch my face, and know perfectly rationally everything was fine, but trying to convince my brain that everything is fine, well, that was impossible. I'm sure I sounded quite drunk trying to explain how it felt to the dentist. It took about six hours to wear off completely, and now I just feel like someone threw a punch to my jaw. The best part about this, though, was that I came home that night and listened to the episode of Radiolab called Where Am I? --and about three minutes in, Oliver Sachs started to describe disorders related to proprioception, our perception of where our self and our body exist in space--and how most people experience a loss of proprioception during application of anesthetics like novocaine. Radiolab, you are suspiciously good at being relevant to my life.
My family sent me tulips for my birthday, and gosh, are they ever gorgeous!
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