On Tuesday, I had oral surgery.

No, this isn’t a euphemism for dental work. I mean I had oral surgery, the kind that involves a scalpel and what is advertised as “a little discomfort.” In my particular case, this meant injecting a poisonous Botox-like liquid into sections of my head, cutting flesh out of the roof of my mouth, and then stitching said flesh into new areas where it doesn’t really belong and has, since Tuesday, been surprised to find itself.

I don’t know what I did to deserve any of this, because I hadn’t even met this dental surgeon before the consult a week before, and I’ve never done anything to malign himself or his family. This just seems malicious on his part.

I should add at this point that this Frankenstein maneuver on Tuesday is only the beginning. This is merely the prep stage for implanting completely foreign and manmade constructs into another area of my mouth. So while I’m enjoying the current stage, I have much more fun to look forward to over the coming weeks. And during the holidays, too!

Barring minor inconveniences, this had been proceeding relatively fine since Tuesday morning. This initial “procedure” had been communicated as requiring 45 minutes, but was actually completed in only 44 minutes. (I timed it.) I like to save time — as though we could actually save time! But a guy can fantasize, can’t he? — and so even if it’s only a minute, I’ll take it and make it mine. Everything seemed hunkydory after the procedure, so I announced that I was going to go to my office.

“No,” said the doctor. “You’re going home.”

“I feel fine. You did a good job. I’m going in for a bit.” (“A bit” generally means all day. Because I like it there.)

“No. You need to go home.” (This dialogue, by the way, is assisted by your reading his voice with a Syrian accent. It adds a lilt. And a directness of sorts.)

“Okay,” I said. Not to be defeated, I added, “But I’m working from there!”

I stopped on the way home and picked up the medicinal rinse he’d prescribed and even the pain medication, although I couldn’t see why I’d need the latter. Everything was good! At home, I settled in with my laptop and started pulling the levers and switches of my business that are available to me remotely, suspecting at the same time that most of what I was doing was annoying other people who wished I’d just be really off for the day as previously advertised to them. When I got on Skype chat, I imagined I could hear groans of disappointment from the other side.

Then, after about two hours of basking in my productivity while actually accomplishing little, in the way that a dog endlessly circling a dog bed is just sure it’s making that dog bed somehow perfect for lying down on just by walking around it for five minutes, I found myself texting this to my business partner: “HOLY SHIT THE ANESTHESIA JUST WORE OFF!!!!” I can now testify that as interesting as I found it to have someone saw off a section of the roof of my mouth and hold it before me with the proud proclamation, “Looks like sushi,” what was even more interesting — because of the intensity of the surprise — was just how surprisingly painful this procedure proves to be about two hours later. So I chucked my laptop to the side, ran downstairs in my underwear and scrambled for that bottle of pain pills.

So that was minor inconvenience number one. Which, I later verified by checking the post-op documents I’d been issued — which I would now classify as “a false bill of goods” — had been defined as “minor discomfort.” Yes. This was minor, and the next step up would be having my leg hacksawed off.

The second minor inconvenience was the string.

At some point later that evening, I had the feeling that something was on my tongue. What was it? I could feel it, and it kept moving…. Then I realized it was a piece of string. More specifically, a suture. It was maddeningly distracting. Once you find something hanging in your mouth, it’s impossible to ignore. Don’t you find that to be true? It doesn’t belong there, and you know it, and so it has to go. But this was a suture, so presumably it was holding something up in place — specifically, the wounded parts of my palate! So my first attempted correction was just to tongue it back into place: to take the tip of my tongue and, with it, to moisten that string and plaster it back into place against the roof of my mouth. Which worked.

And then the string fell.

And then I tongued it back into place again.

And then it fell again.

And then I tongued it back up there again.

And so on.

This little game seemed to go on for hours. Given how I clock time when I’m getting fed up with something, it was probably more like four minutes, but I’m telling you, it felt like an eternity before I launched back out of bed and grabbed a pair of bathroom scissors and cut off all of the hanging thread.

And that worked beautifully.

Until more fell down later.

So then I cut that off.

Then last night when I came home from a meeting downtown there was even more of it hanging down. So I cut that off.

And then tonight before driving out of town for a seminar, I felt it again and looked in the mirror and there were about four feet of sutures hanging out of the top of my mouth and I cut that off too. I still feel more of it up there even now, though! Just how much thread did he stitch into my head — a full spool? I feel like the fish in “The Old Man And The Sea,” hooked at the end of a 200-foot line. Just where is all of this nylon stitched up there, and why does it keep falling down? Just how far can this go?

But even that seemed like a minor-minor inconvenience compared to what started today, Friday, three full days after “the procedure.” On what should have been a healing day. A day of recovery, and of reflection.

When I awoke this morning, I discovered an alien feeling between two molars on the left side of my jaw. Something felt big and fleshy, like an area of my body had become engorged with blood, but not the usual one. No, this particular tumescence was precisely at the crime scene of Tuesday’s action. I knew something was wrong. So I leapt from bed and ran to the bathroom mirror somewhat like Jeff Goldblum in “The Fly” to see what it was. I looked in the mirror and, much like Goldblum in said epic, said aloud, “What… is that?”

“That” was a blue-black-purple lump spilling over from my gum and nestled atop my tooth. Was it part of my gumline? Was it that graft from the roof of my mouth? What was it? And why was it blue-black-purple? I fished around in my dopp kit and pulled out a dental implement; probing with it revealed that the blue-black-purple lump was still attached to me somehow. I couldn’t imagine how that could be — or what this was — or where that attachment was anchored — or, actually, anything of the nature of what I was seeing. I decided not to panic. Panic wasn’t called for. But fretting definitely seemed in order. I also wondered why the movie version Frankenstein monster isn’t generally even more annoyed, baffled, and angry — and why the novel version is so comparatively sedate. He’s cobbled together from parts of many different dead people, and awakens to set off on a quest for his own humanity. In my case, all they’ve done is move one fingernail-sized droplet of my flesh from one area to its nearby neighborhood, and it’s left me perplexed and fraught. I decide my best course of action is just to ignore it and see if it will go away. Somewhat the way I handled the boogie man as a child.

But then, in the shower, I suddenly feel something rolling around in my mouth and spit it out and see that it’s the blue-black-purple lump, rich with my own blood, now spattered onto the floor of my natural-rock shower, where water is hitting it and draining away, pinkishly. And then, fast as a blink, my fleshlet slips down the drain and into the recesses of our plumbing.

Well, I think, that takes care of that. So: off to my office.

At my particular office in our suite of offices, I discover that my lights don’t work. Click-click-click-click-click; I attempt it repeatedly believing somehow that this time they’ll just come on for God’s sake. But no. Oh, so it’s going to be one of those days, I think — but no matter, I’ll just sit here in the gloom, bleeding inside my mouth where the blue-black-purple lump had been. It’s no problem. I’ll just occasionally get up and go into my private bathroom here and expectorate some blood and then come sit back down.

An hour or so after my arrival, I start to feel something catching between those teeth again and, as I’m speaking with an employee who’s come upstairs to consult with me on something, I suddenly announce, “Sorry — excuse me!” and run into my bathroom, leaving him to wonder what’s going on. And, yes, I spit out another lumpen mass of bloody abortive tissue.

Now I’m really starting to wonder about this. I share the situation with my business partner, my workday shoal in troubled waters. She talks to me as though I’m a child, in precisely the tone and manner I need at the moment: “Just call the doctor.” She’s right, I realize! He did this — he has to offer solutions. I might be bleeding to death right now, and won’t he be sorry. In fact, won’t they all be sorry to find me dead up here because I just bled to death, slowly, from my gums. “He seemed okay,” someone would say tearfully at the funeral, “we just never thought he’d bleed to death so quickly.”

I called the doctor and left a message with his receptionist. She said he’d be in at 2 and would call me.

“In at 2,” I thought. In at 2. If you don’t come in until 2… why come in at all? Why keep office hours? Why have a practice? 2 p.m. Why not 2:30? Or 4? Or never? I could be bleeding to death here.

When he hadn’t called me by 2:15, I called again. Now she said he was seeing a patient. “I’m a patient,” I said, kindly, or at least as kindly as possible while my heart was thrumming because my life’s blood was seeping away down my gullet. “He had one waiting as soon as he came in,” she said.

So I called again at 3. He still couldn’t take the call. Fifteen minutes later, in the middle of a meeting three of us are having down in the conference room, I excuse myself to go relieve myself of yet another lump of glistening gelatinous matter from my suppurating wound. I notice that people are regarding me strangely, and who can blame them, given my air of crazed menace and my blood-flecked lips?

Finally, at 4 o’clock, I get him on the phone. For all I know, 4 p.m. is when his office hours — or hour — actually starts on a Friday. I explain the situation.

“Those are blood clots,” he says.

“Blood clots?”

“Yes, blood clots. You are a bleeder. Have you had a test at the hospital to see how long you bleed? That might come in useful if you are ever in a car accident — you would know in advance.”

His tone to me suggests an attempt to blame me in some way for bleeding too much, or for failing to have my bleeding time measured. Perhaps in Syria it’s the norm for people to have their bleeding time measured, but around here, I’ve never heard of such a thing.

“So this isn’t the graft that I’m spitting up?” Because the notion of having this grafting procedure performed again has left me dismal and unruly.

“Oh, no. No. That is stitched up tight. Even if you tried, you could not –” he says, readying an unfortunate image that will stay with me, “– pull it out with a fork! These are blood clots. But the surgery was days ago. As I say, you are a bleeder!”

I have never before been a bleeder and find myself unhappy with being characterized as one.

“How do I stop it?” I ask.

He tells me to get a tea bag, soak it, and stick it in the affected area. He claims that this will stanch the bleeding. And, I suppose, give me a pick-me-up in the form of Earl Grey. Either that, or he’s playing a trick on me. And not a funny one.

Newly relieved (to a degree), I do my best to make nice with all the people I’d been bedeviling earlier all day, adopting an air of joviality before packing it in to pick up a few things at home for my overnight business trip. At home, I root around in my wife’s awful herbal tea collection — dusty boxes of years-old useless herbal tea “remedies” that promise relaxation or good bowel movements or a satisfying menstruation or whatever. I don’t want any of those conditions met — I just want a good absorbent tea bag. Finally I select a fistful of non-caffeine green tea bags and head out the door.

For the next two hours I crawl through freeway traffic southward, swallowing blood and chewing gum to alleviate the taste of my own ferruginous nutrients.

Finally, I arrive at the hotel and dash to my room and soak a tea bag and stuff it into the pulpy red cavern in my mouth. I leave it in there for 15 minutes as advised, a thin slime of greenish tea drool descending down my chin. I look in the mirror and get a glimpse of abject infirmity, of me drooling and hopeless, wondering what it is that has brought me to this stage, and just how much worse this all will get in the years and decades to come. After the endless 15 minutes, I extract the tea bag and dump it with gladness into the trash. And then spit out some more blood. Because, hey, I’m a bleeder.

In the 90 minutes since, I’ve spit out two more chunks formerly of myself. But overall, things are seeming much better. That’s because there’s a 7-11 within walking distance of this hotel, and at 7-11’s in California, you can buy wine. I selected a delightful ten-dollar bottle of Menage a Trois. It’s a California red wine, and I’ve certainly been enjoying it up here in my room. It goes awfully well with especially rare meat.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 21st, 2014 at 11:50 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.