Yesterday began like every big event in my life begins – childbirth, exams, shopping – with a shower. No shaving, however: I am a married woman, after all, and I don’t want to give anyone the wrong idea. There’ll be time enough to shave for my future standby dentist husband when the Hub is castaway. Don’t worry: the Hub knows all about it and is hoping I’m castaway first so that he can get Ashton to dump Demi and move on with his life. I’m babbling now; slap me, someone, but form an orderly queue. Blame the tablets.
I’m not sure that Mr Lee – my future standby dentist husband and on-off chief teeth caregiver for ten years – recognised me until he shoved his head in my mouth and saw my manky left molar, but I’ll let that pass. By the time he was standing behind and over me, applying a corkscrew to my wisdom tooth and punching and twisting it so hard that the woman in the surgery underneath who had only come in for a steam clean went home with an extraction as well, I was past caring. It was not a simple procedure, he informed me; though not as difficult as he had expected. ‘Well thashallwight then,’ I wepwied, and twied to phone the Hub to cowect me. Unfortunately, he thought my first three calls were from a child who had discovered the joys of phoning and it was only on the fourth call when I started crying and the blubbering sounded like the end of every argument we’ve ever had, that he realised it was me.
The procedure was horrible, but not as horrible as I had expected. The worst part was getting anaesthetic: five injections, though I only felt three and a half, but one of those was near a nerve and felt like an electric shock. That might explain why I spent the whole hour rigid on the couch like an inmate in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. The painkillers are for my neck as much as my mouth. What helped keep me strapped to the chair was my brilliant husband’s idea: my MP3 player. I’ve only used it twice since Christmas – mostly because I can’t work it properly yet – but I took it along and listened to the brilliant Mango Groove while the blood was sucked from my gums and Mr Sadist Lee – who I don’t think I am going to marry, after all; I’ll settle for an optician instead – hacked away at my ivories. It was like the soundtrack was made for the occasion: it started with Hellfire when I was having my injections, as in, ‘your [anaesthetic] burns me like a hellfire.’. Next came Too Many Tears, accompanying my blubbing when it hurt; and as he finished up it was Hometalk.
And finally, I was a Special Star because I had endured it all so stoically.
Aside: check out Mango Groove online; they are the best South African pop group ever. It was almost worth living through apartheid and the violence that followed just to discover them.
The Hub brought me home, ignoring the wet hand stains on my pants from my encounter with the surgery toilets, tucked me up in bed and fed me soup and painkillers. I slept and read and slept and watched The Untouchables for the zillionth time – there’s nothing like watching Bob de Niro beat a man’s brains out with a baseball bat to make me feel better – and slept. My biggest problem was drinking (stop it!): I could only use the left side of my mouth but I couldn’t open it enough to use a glass. the Hub gave me an old plastic cup he found in the back of the cupboard; the type with an inbuilt curly straw, but that didn’t stop me from spilling water all over my pyjamas. I must have had a bit of a temperature because it dried quite quickly (I felt too poorly to get out of bed and change). I thought at first that I wasn’t feeling too bad, just before I borrowed a baby and named it after my dog and the Hub bought a gross of pretty dark blue kettles with flowers on them for 6pence each, buy two get one free, at Home Bargains. When I woke up, the anaesthetic had worn off and I knew it, in the way that you do after going eight rounds with a wrestling dentist.
A good night’s sleep last night didn’t help much, and I woke this morning to intense pain, numbness in the tongue and a hugely swollen face. However, the self-pity is wearing off now so the pain is merely uncomfortable, the numbness reduced to a slight tingle and the swelling is barely noticeable. Salt rinses, antibiotics and co-codamol are doing their job, and I feel well enough now to lie on the couch all day and watch telly. Once my stitches have dissolved in a couple of days I will feel ready to tackle housework again, but I don’t want to push it, do I?
Don’t you think it’s bizarre how losing a wisdom tooth has made me so cunning?
The Laughing Housewife 
I welcome your comments but be warned: I'm menopausal and as likely to snarl as smile. Wine or Maltesers are an acceptable bribe; or a compliment about my youthful looks and cheery disposition will do in a pinch.