O holy night

I am not a particularly hale and hearty person. I actually try to minimize my medical complaints, until I realize that I’m saying to a friend over and over, “Actually, I can’t do that because…” “Actually I…” “Actually…” I get tired of the “Actual” saga and eventually spill my guts about the tiny things that aren’t quite right about me that add up to a sum that isn’t at all quite right.

One of the side-effects of medical disquietude is that I am a holy person. I am a person made of many holes. There’s the holes I put there myself, the body piercings that are in or out and their scars. There’s the sinus surgery that made holes inside my nose bigger (but didn’t straighten my septum, a surgery I opted not to do at the time, and a choice that I’ll always regret). And now, two new holes.

The first is a series of newly recurring holes. In my arms. I have been vaguely diagnosed with an undifferentiated arthritic condition in my knees. It’s not that terrible a thing really, just mildly annoying when the dog wants to go out *again* and I have to trek up and down the flights of stairs at our walk-up flat. But the kicker in the undifferentiated arthritis pants is that the medicine that has worked best for me so far is on an overt mission to destroy my liver. Go figure? Medical treatment, meet medical poison.

So the liver holes. No, the medicine doesn’t punch holes in my liver (yet). I’m constantly getting blood drawn to see how this month’s arthritis-medication-to-liver-enzyme-levels are stacking up. (I could go into lengthy discourse at this point about my ALT and AST levels and how it affects my overall health in precise detail, but that would be either rather dull or medical fetishist.)

The net result of the new hole series is that I want to grow new veins. The soothing phlebotomists at my doctor’s lab are all swell gals, but they need new places to make holes in me. My arms are very tired of the stick and draw. I always come to work with big white bandages in my elbows and then laugh about my liver tests. I look like a medical accident waiting to happen with holes in my arms covered in swaddling clothes. “I was once like you!”

Now the second new hole is one big hole. Or I assume that it is because I can’t see it, but it is obviously present in my life and feels rather gaping. It is a tooth hole. The past few weeks (that feel like millennia), I have been undergoing the Never-Ending Root Canal. One of my “Actually” medical ailments is that certain of my teeth are very unhappy fellows, bent on self-destruction. Many of my teeth are perfectly happy and content to continue on being teeth, but these special teeth, the nihilist teeth, just insist on going under the drill. This tooth, tooth number 2 in the dental chart, has decided to go full on root decay necessitating the endodentic procedure known as “root canal.” I don’t understand that name for the procedure yet, even after my research, but I’m sure if I remember to ask I’ll get a fabulous explanation. “Root canal” sounds like “Love Canal” or “Panama Canal,” something dangerous and politically divisive.

I have endured the Never-Ending Root Canal as gracefully as I can muster, but I have reached a state of mental decay over this last and (pray for me) final hole. I had laser gingivectomy. The decayed root of tooth number two was so bad that it tried to take my gingiva with it. I guess it succeeded, because before my dentist had barely finished saying “I’m psyching myself up for you; this is worse than I thought,” I was introduced to New Guy with Laser. Laser guy was totally nice. He assured me I wouldn’t feel a thing but that I would hear a popping sound. He said afterward my gums would feel like I had burned my mouth on hot pizza, or the area around the Never-Ending Root Canal tooth number two might be sore. But I shouldn’t feel pain.

Let me just interject that when a guy with a laser tells you you won’t feel pain, ask more questions. Warily.

So what laser guy did was remove the affected part of my gum and gingiva. Do you know where gingiva is? According to the chart on my mouthwash bottle, it’s way down there. So yeah, the removed gingiva has left me an interesting new hole. A new hole I struggle to keep my tongue out of, cause trust me, it wants to go there, and I don’t know how long I can stop it from spelunking.

What the new hole feels like is a jagged crevasse that opens up parallel to my tooth. Tiny tooth-men could have an X-treme adventure climbing the terrain on their trip to mount tongue. But the good thing that I keep reminding myself is that the crevasse is cauterized. I mean, isn’t that the surgical benefit of working with a laser? Faster healing time, instant cauterization? Sounds good to me at least.

But the new hole is like the others, much more painful than I’d expected. I fight an hourly losing battle against keeping snack particles from lodging in the crevasse, and it aches awfully bad for a pizza burn. If I got this burnt from pizza, I’d be off pizza for quite a while, resulting in “Actually, I’m not eating pizza now, I got a bad burn.” I think my new medical “Actual” will be, “Actually, I’m not on lasers right now. Maybe some other time?”