A Little Less Wise

So last Friday I had the pleasure of having all four of my wisdom teeth removed. The bottom two were horizontally impacted (which is bad) and the top two were slightly impacted. Basically, the dentist told me that I should have had this procedure done about ten years ago. Of course, ten years ago I didn't have any dental insurance. Which is why I've waited until now. In case anyone is wondering about timing, the earlier the better. I hurt.

I created a little photo-journalistic trek through my surgery and recovery. *WARNING* Not all of the pictures are pretty... nor am I pretty. In any of them, really.

This is Friday morning, pre-operation and normal face (non-chipmunk).
Daniel graciously agreed to give me a ride there, on his way to work. We stopped by for some MC worship (which I forgot to take a picture of). Upon entering the sanctuary we found Sam Mello in his birthday suit.

Then on to the doctors office, where I waited for a bit and made friends with a strange looking fish there. Wherever I put my face to look into the tank, he would swim right up to me and stare at me. His little mouth made an O, like he was constantly in a state of amazement.

It's time. They strapped me down to the chair (literally, so I wouldn't strike anyone while unconscious), put a hair cap on me, a cuff on my arm (that automatically measured my blood pressure every five minutes), some electrodes under my shirt to measure my heart rate (the monitor went boop-boop-boop with my pulse), and a little clamp on my finger. A tube clamped onto my nose blew oxygen into my lungs. And I waited. I tried to see how slowly I could make my heart beat by controlling my breathing. 55 bpm. Then the doctor came in all in a hurry ("Hey, sorry I'm late, how are you?"), tied off my arm with a rubber tube and stuck an IV in. I had discovered from the nurse that they were doing fourteen extractions that day. Fourteen! "I'm giving you something to help you relax," was how he phrased it, and I noticed my heart rate went booping a little faster. They engaged me in conversation about the scar on my arm, and I knew they were keeping me distracted, getting me to talk. "I put my arm through a window." "Why didn't you just open the window?" "Well, it was actually a french door, and I was trying to push it open." "I once ran into a glass sliding door and shattered it." "I did that too, but I bounced off. My heart is beating faster." And by that time I was feeling very relaxed, and a bit sleepy, so I stopped talking, and woke up, and it was done. My mouth had several sea-sponges crammed in it and my cheeks scraped against the wall. They helped me into a wheelchair, Miss Bonnie appeared there, and they wheeled me out to her car. I numbly realized it was my first time in her Mini. Here's a photo from shortly after I got to the Fretwells, where I spent my first day of recuperation.

A lovely look at an extraction site.

Here's day two of recuperation.

And my third day... my most painful day, and my ugliest to date.

Farewell, oh my little wisdom teeth!

Today

Today is Tuesday, January 24th, 2006. There will never be another today. It's an one-day special, you only get today to live it. And that last minute, while you were reading this blog? Yeah, it's gone. Forever. You'll never, ever live that minute again.

Thought you might like to know.

Wow, Some People Must Have Lots of Spare Time

The blue ball machine. The best way to appreciate it is to watch a single blue ball for as long as you can (or have the patience to).

Fine Dining

Proof that bachelors DO sometimes eat well. Lightly marinated sirloin steak on a bed of rice, garnished with fresh, lightly sauteed red bell pepper, accompanied with toasted sourdough bread, a mixed green salad and a supple, well-rounded cabernet sauvignon from Francis Coppola.  

Shot in the Back by My Doctor

Today I had a 3 1/2 inch needle stuck into my back. Twice. Yeah, it was pretty awesome. Doctor Frank shot some kind of 100% natural anti-inflammatory derived from plants around my lowest vertebrae, where my spine meets my hips. We did it at a radiology clinic where I laid under this big machine so they could watch the needle going in to be exactly precise in their insertion. I didn't find out until afterward that the needle was THREE-AND-A-HALF INCHES! Yeah. Of course I didn't feel it, because the shot up the area with a local anesthetic. Which hurt. But when he squeezed the liquid into the area near my spine, I could feel the pressure in my tissue there, where there had never been pressure before like that. Interesting sensation. You should try it sometime.

Cambridge, England - Part I

You wake up in a small, narrow room. You walk down the hall to the bathroom, where you shower in a small, narrow shower, where you push a small on/off button to start the water running. You get dressed and head upstairs, where you run into no one other than your good friend from England, Lucie Moore!

After embarrassing her a bit by snapping a photo of her out on the balcony, you sit down and chat for a bit over coffee and croissants. That done, it's time to head out into Cambridge to explore the town.

You walk out the front door into a small, narrow street. (On the way out, you notice the very small and cute fireplace, so you happily snap a photo of it, noticing how cute and snug everything is here.)

You notice how the street was built before cars were around, so it is also small, cute and narrow, and no cars are able to drive on it. You notice how the address, 13 Portugal Place, has a certain ring to it.

As you wander around the university, you quickly discover that Cambridge is a conglomeration of many smaller colleges, and they all have quite nice names, like Trinity, King's, Christ, Mary's, St. John's. Lucie tells you which college she attends, but you quickly forget. You later discover that much of the land that Cambridge now sits on was originally owned by monasteries, and many of the colleges were formed to train clergymen. You snap away as you wander through the different colleges, learning where Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, King Charles, John Witherspoon, and William Wilberforce attended. Much later, as you sit in front of your laptop back home, blogging about your trip, you lament the fact that you will only be able to share a scant few of these photos. (You include more than you should, thus significantly lengthening the download time of your blog for those with slower internet connections.)

A bit later, you hike the tower of a church (which was closed, but the nice man who took time to express the frustration he felt regarding his coworkers who would not take the time to tri-fold the brochures for the church, let you go up anyway). You snap a few shots from the top.

At this point, you realize that this post is getting inordinately long, and that you are sitting in your pajamas and it's after noon, and you need to do a lot of stuff today. You take a moment to add "Part I" in the title and decide to finish the other half a bit later.

Switzerland

Hi there.

So I just arrived back in Biel from Skilager yesterday (pronounced "shee'-logger"), along with the other Americans here visiting: Jen, Laura, Peter and Gillian. That's right, it's quite the party here. It was wonderful, of course... we stayed in a big ol' lodge in the middle of the Alps. The place we stayed and skiied was called Le Moleson (put a little hyphen over the "e" in Moleson) in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. Over a hundred kids were there, so it was by far the biggest Skilager ever. We had an amazing time, it was wonderful to see all of their shining, smiling faces and give them big American hugs.

On Friday a few of us went for a trip to Wildstrubbel ("Veeld'-shtroob-el) to hike four hours up into the back country (10,000 foot peak!) and snowboard back down for an hour straight in pristine powder. Unfortunately, once we got there we found that the avalanche danger was too high for us to go, so we never used our snowshoes, poles, avalanche gear, oh well. But we still had a blast snowboarding all day.

Here's a few photos of my time there in the Alps.

Upon first arriving at the Wildstrubbel, we immediately saw this small avalanche coming down from a peak. Not a good sign:

Peter and I:
And Andreas whom you (perhaps) know and love:
Gotta love that macro setting... here's some frost, close up:

And of course, the lovely Swiss folks:

First and second year students:

Third year (current) students:

With my Swiss family:

MBoM

if I could open my mouth
wide enough for a marching band to march out
they would make your name sing
and bend through alleys and bounce off all the buildings
i wish we could open our eyes
to see in all directions at the same time
oh what a beautiful view
if you were never aware of what was around you