Workaholic vs Wisdom Teeth
Prioritize everything except yourself after outpatient surgery, pay a steep price.
Ten days before my scheduled wisdom tooth extraction, I hear back from a job that I have forgotten I applied for.
To be fair, this forgetfulness is not due to my lack of interest in the job. Au contraire! At the time of application, I wanted this job so badly, I normally would’ve been checking my email inbox for news from them obsessively following the submission of my application. But things were not normal at the time. It was month 16 of the pandemic, and I had honestly forgotten about looking forward to things. Whatever basic faculties I was born with that might’ve helped me find joy in the day-to-day of what I have called, by turns, The Quar, the Panasonic, the Patricia, or “this fucking shit” (while waving a hand vaguely around my head), those abilities have decayed significantly since March 2020. All of which is to say: when a response to my application for this job (which I in fact very much want) does appear in my inbox a few weeks later, I first assume it is spam instead of a lovely “We are very interested in interviewing you!” message.
The turnaround following this email is swift; I agree to an interview, and meet the hiring team on Zoom two days later. They warn me that applications were not closing until the following weekend, and that I thus will not hear from them about possible next steps until a few days after that. I acknowledge this, thank them for their time, and then proceed to obsessively check my email in the days that follow because it has finally clicked that this could be something to be excited about. Never mind the fact that positive emotions in the early stages of interviewing for an exciting job is one of the biggest high-risk, high-reward set-ups one can subject oneself to. Did I mention there’s a Panasonic outside? Sure! No worries. It’s all good! Watch as I frenetically refresh my inbox!
Ten days after that initial “let’s interview!” email, on a Friday morning, my mother picks me up and drives me into the bowels of suburbia for dental surgery. Specifically, for wisdom tooth extraction, for which it is worth noting that I am ten years late in getting done (indeed, my referring dentist literally asked “what happened?” when examining my X-rays the month before). This is not even something I could blame on the Panasonic; the avoidance has been fully my own, comprised of two parts anxiety, one part “well it doesn’t hurt much yet,” and a dash of “maybe one day a job will offer me affordable dental coverage” magical thinking. So, of course, instead of getting the cursed teeth out before they became problematic, I have waited until I can no longer deny that facts that 1. affordable dental insurance is nonexistent in this country, and 2. my teeth have begun waging war on me.
Partway through our 40 minute drive to extraction town, I turn to my mother and say, “I honestly don’t think I’m going to hear back from this job. It will have been two weeks soon. I think I have to just let it go.” She is sad for me, but understanding. There isn’t really another way to think about it, at this point. Then we arrive at the surgical office, and spend many years in bureaucratic and endodontic hell. I realize I have forgotten my paper referral, retrieve a soft copy, wait over sixty minutes to be taken into one of the patient rooms, get informed that I may lose feeling in my jaw because of nerve damage related to two impacted wisdom teeth, and ultimately wind up left alone in a room with a spread of of dental tools from the stone age for a few minutes while the people in charge of my mouth scrub in down the hall.
When I wake up from my anesthetic stupor, my problematic teeth (or what’s left of them) are strewn on a tray in front of me. I cannot move, or feel, much of my face. I am escorted to an upsettingly yellow room that is trimmed with cocoa-colored wood and roughly the size of a public toilet stall. My mother is called in, and we sit knee-to-knee until someone decides I am un-drugged enough to walk. The deeply unpleasant nurse who has refused to speak directly to me all morning tells us to leave out the back door by the dumpster, so that waiting patients don’t see my mouthful of bloody gauze and swollen face. So I, an almost-thirty-year-old, trail my Mum out past the trash and over to her car so that she can ferry me back to her very nice couch and ply me with liquids. It occurs to me that this is why one should get this procedure done whilst still a teenager. Not ONLY because it’s better for one’s dental and physical health, but because otherwise it becomes an exercise in humbleness for one and one’s lengthy resume of “here are the ways in which I have been acting as an adult for a long time, aren’t I impressive?” examples. She buys me an iced coffee and a liquid yogurt, in hopes of staving off a caffeine headache and medicine-induced nausea. I try to drink the coffee at stoplights, but because I cannot feel my mouth, repeatedly dump it down my shirt instead. When we return to my parents’ house, I am largely inert for the remainder of the day, while their two cats and panicky dog take turns examining me with varying levels of confusion.
The next morning is simultaneously better and worse. On the one hand, the procedure is fully behind me. On the other, the upper 60% of my body feels like a crime. It is Saturday, which is good; I scheduled the procedure on a Friday so that I would only have to take one day off from work, have that afternoon and subsequent weekend to recover, then return to life (nannying full time between semesters of graduate school) on the Monday. I roll over and blearily examine my phone, realizing as the room spins that I have likely gotten no deep sleep. I dimly remember the dog stumbling up the stairs in order to visit me in the middle of the night, his collar and tags jingling like a holiday parade. Now, on my phone screen, I register a series of notifications, and since my FaceID cannot ID my face this morning, I have to fumble with the passcode until I type it out successfully. It’s only when I tap open my email that I realize that I have heard back about the job I interviewed for ten days ago. Thanks so much for interviewing with us! It was good to meet you, it says. We’d like to move you to the next round in the process!, it says. Please send us a short essay examining X from the angles of Y and Z, using at least 3 references, by Tuesday! it says.
Holy shit.
My father is out of town, caring for a close friend who has just undergone surgery (post-op care seems to be my parents’ shared activity this weekend). Downstairs, I tell my mother (very slowly and puffily) about the interview news. She is both thrilled and taken aback by the writing assignment I’ve been given. I try to reassure her that submitting a writing sample makes sense, given the position I am trying to get. She says, basically, “I guess you’ll be fine, because you’re a relentless workhorse, but this seems like a lot to ask of yourself right now.” We text my father to inform him, and he immediately says, “ask for an extension.” My mother says this is a good idea. My partner, and the two close friends who have been group texting me since I got out of surgery yesterday, agree. I am concerned by it. What if the organization thinks I’m asking for handouts? What if they say “you know what, don’t bother. Thanks for applying anyways!”? I have a sudden flashback to a manager at a previous job, telling a new hire, “remember when your bus broke down the day you had your final interview with us? You’re lucky we already wanted to hire you! If we hadn’t, we definitely would’ve just told you to get a ride home and not bother coming in!” This manager had then busted out laughing, while the rest of us tried to sink into the floor in horror. What if this happens to me with this job because I ask for extra time with my writing sample?!
My mother takes a long look at me, and asks how I’m feeling. I tell her that I didn’t really sleep; maybe that was the steroids I’d been prescribed? “Hmm,” she says. “Anything else?” I consider: a little nauseous, a little dizzy, but no stomach pains from the antibiotic, and I made sure to take my fresh dose of painkillers at 3am, so I’m not in agony? “Hmm,” she says again. “I think you should ask for an extension.”
By noon, I agree. Not because I’m any less concerned about losing traction in the application process by asking for a favor, but because the steroids have hit, and I feel like a danger to myself and others. I am very dizzy, out of my body, blurry at the edges, and faintly top heavy. I reply to the application email chain, and ask if I might have until Wednesday instead of Tuesday to produce my writing sample. I explain that I am recovering from outpatient surgery, and am on more drugs than I have ever been in my life. I then put my computer away because it makes me feel ill to read anything on the screen. My mother drives me back to the apartment I have spent about half the pandemic living in, ostensibly to rest more, but I force myself to sit down at my desk, and open my laptop again. It’s been an hour, so maybe I can better handle reading onscreen now?
I’m wrong.
I move to the couch, so that I can at least be lying down while reading articles in preparation for this writing sample. Because yes, of course, I may have exited surgery 24 hours ago but I am absolutely now hustling to do this assignment. I am a Hard Worker. I am Dependable. I Never Back Down From a Challenge.
I also End Up Watching Korean Dramas for Four Hours, rotating every 15 minutes so that a different side of my head is resting on an ice pack wrapped in two potholders my cousin crocheted and sent from Michigan during the first half of the pandemic.
In the evening, my partner comes over for dinner and company after he gets off work. My mother texts me before he arrives, reminding me to alert him to the fact that I will need help cooking dinner, etc. I do this, then promptly start making my own dinner. When he walks through the door, his first question is, “what are you doing?!” The second is, “did you really need your mother to tell you to tell me you needed help?” Answers: “cooking for my own damn self because I am FINE, THANK YOU,” and “Yes. I did need her to tell me to do that.” He asks me if I have gotten any work done on the writing sample. I admit that I have not. He tells me he’s relieved to hear that I rested instead. I tell him I’m trying to think that way, too, but not feeling magically better the day after surgery is frustrating me more than I expected. He asks me if I’d like to go for a car ride for some entertainment while he gets himself some dinner. I feel like a three-year-old. Then again, maybe I am one.
After our Fun Drive, my partner introduces me to Gilmore Girls. We watch several episodes while I slurp up the soup I stubbornly made earlier, and he eats the chewable takeout food we drove to get for him. The mother-daughter relationship on Gilmore Girls makes me very anxious, and I don’t like the relentless Asian jokes that are made at the expense of the daughter’s best friend. Also, that one guy at the prep school said daughter gets into gives off major sex-assaulty vibes. But the show’s writing is otherwise pretty good, and it is a total escape from reality. My favorite character is the French manager at the hotel. I take my drugs, go to bed, and while my partner nods off I cogitate in wakefulness because of said drugs, and my general concern that I will never feel normal again.
I have been fortunate in that I have avoided serious medical intervention in my life. My history with doctors and specialists has been defined largely by non-surgical procedures and weird diets, not being cut open. So it is only on Sunday morning (day 2 post-op), drunk with fatigue, pain, and medication, that I begin to come to terms with the fact that I was in no way prepared for how I would feel after getting teeth jackhammered and extracted from my head. I have only arranged for two and a half days off from working, because I assumed that was all I’d need. Doesn’t my body know I have Important Things To Do? I need to get back to taking care of the baby I’ve been hired to nanny between semesters— to earn money and to maintain my commitment to the family paying me. I need to start exercising again because what if I gain weight while recovering from surgery?! WHAT IF?! I need to research and prepare and edit and submit this writeup for this job I very much want. Glaringly absent from this “must do” list? “Recover from getting wisdom teeth out."
My failure to anticipate a need for extended recovery time is in part to the combined effects of needing income, not thinking of dental extraction as actual surgery, and getting no guidance from my dental surgeon (in fact, the most helpful advice I have gotten is from a close friend of my mother’s, who texted me the day of the procedure to say that when she got her wisdom teeth out— FIFTY YEARS EARLIER— her doctor cautioned her that eating enough would be hard and that patients must be diligent about caloric intake. I honestly hope that that doctor’s descendants are doing well today, because his was the best advice any medical professional gave me.). But I am also entirely aware of the fact that I have made my surgical recovery experience a hundred times worse than it could’ve been because I have refused to treat it as what it is: surgical recovery. Behold:
I end up forcing myself to work on that writing sample in the days after surgery, so that I can hand it in before my requested extended due date.
I go back to caring for a ten-month-old baby for eight hours a day less than 72 hours after I wake up from the anesthetic.
I walk over six miles on my first workday, 3 days post-op
I call the dentist, 4 days post-op, to get permission from Deeply Unpleasant Nurse to stop taking the prescribed steroid (why? you might ask. Well, I’ll tell you: because it makes me feel incredibly ill, and thus limits my capacity for Productivity).
I do all of this through Tuesday evening, the fourth day since surgery, culminating in submission of my writing sample in advance of the original deadline. I am, as it were, Productive. Then I wake up the next morning, Wednesday, and everything goes to hell.
I have had maybe two migraines in my life; I’m an extremely lucky woman. Those two fluke occurrences only came to pass during specific moments of intense stress, wherein my body maxed out and opted for ocular migraines instead of its other, preferred, forms of self-sabotage. Both times, I experienced temporary blindness in one eye, and pain localized to one eye socket for several nauseating hours. I was barely able to get myself home and into bed. It is this sort of discomfort— its specificity and relentlessness— that I wake up to in my upper right jaw on Wednesday, 5 days post-op. It is a radiating, electric pain that is centered over an inch away from the closest extraction site, meaning the issue is not dry socket or another related wound problem. In fact, there is no clue that might point me towards what the root cause might be, besides the baseline fact of having gotten teeth removed. Are the remaining teeth shifting? Is this some sort of muscular tension release? I have no idea. But what I do know is that, clearly, I failed to consider the possible negative outcomes of discontinuing my nefarious steroid. For all that it made me miserable, it actually had been helping to manage inflammation. Now, the pressure in my jaw and nasal passage is so intense, the raw misery of having four gaping holes in my mouth is background noise. I roll over to reach for the bottle of ibuprofen on the floor beside my bed, and pop four dry. I don’t know it yet, but this will be the high point of my day.
At noon, as I am plying my ten-month-old charge with food (after managing her refusal to take her morning nap and her relentless desire to grab my face for four hours), my stomach does a sudden, and aggressive, pirouette. What the—?I lurch back a little bit. The baby looks at me in bewilderment, an expression I probably mirror. I try to shake it off, and spoon more tiny bits of string cheese onto her tray. But my stomach freaks out once more, and now it hits me: I’m really, really hungry. After five days of eating minimal amounts of soup, overcooked rice, squash, ice cream, sorbet, smooth peanut butter, greens put through a blender, and mashed white beans, the caloric deficit has caught up with me. Pain be damned— and to be clear, eating hurts like all hell right now— I need food and I need it NOW. I need all of the Frozen-themed string cheeses in the world. I am realizing, belatedly, how crucial my mother’s friend’s 50-year-old recovery advice had been: you don’t eat enough when your mouth hurts, and that lack of nourishment makes recovery next to impossible.
The baby observes in wonderment as I house two string cheeses in big bites, too hungry to bother stringing them properly. I dig some of the sorbet I brought out of the family’s freezer (you know. Packed lunch. Obviously). It is mango-flavored, a bright, turmeric yellow, and I know exactly how weird it will taste with peanut butter on it. But I cannot, and do not, care. I need protein badly, and the chill of the dessert will sort of help ease the discomfort of eating. Together, my 10-month-old charge and I finish our respective meals, equally gracelessly. Then, I spend the rest of the day prowling for a snack between games of hide and seek and “smash this block into another block.” I try to chew my way around melon chunks (OUCH), sliced strawberries (HOW DO SEEDS HURT THIS MUCH?!), the rest of the sorbet (now it is gone and I am miserable), and more string cheese (I’ve now eaten all of their string cheese). I feel ridiculous. I also feel as if my head is going to detach from my body and float away, I have done such a poor job at feeding myself over the last few days. My system is screaming Mayday at the top of its lungs, and I’m sunk.
The next two days feel like a return to square one. My father sees me on Thursday (day 6) and panics, convinced I have lost weight. No way, I insist. I haven’t worked out, and I’m puffy as hell. He shakes his head. Kiddo, it doesn’t look like it. I don’t think you’re eating enough. Later, when I go to change from jeans to pajamas, I realize that I have been hiking my pants up around my hips all day. What an irony: I was so terrified of weight gain (the well-trained social animal that I am) that it didn’t occur to me that not being able to eat would actually render me too small for my own good. I miss chewing like it is a friend that has moved away. I am so sick of trying to eat around the pain in my mouth. I am tired of mushy things, and very tired of needing to lie down all the time. I am finally resigned to the fact that I’m not okay, and that I need to act like it.
8 days post-op, things start to ease up. The dizziness slackens, and eating becomes less of an act of self-flagellation. My sleep is real sleep, instead of restlessness. I scale back my ibuprofen intake one capsule at a time, one four-hour window at a time, until I’m at two pills twice a day. Two weeks post-op, only one of my wounds is still acting up, and I am given the tools with which to address it. My surgeon is impressed with my recovery; I wonder if all of her other patients are secretly zombies masquerading as dental patients, or if she just says this to every stiff-faced mess who comes to get their wisdom holes checked after surgery.
Three weeks post-op, I realize that, having not heard back from the job that I raced to druggedly produce a writing sample for in the days after my anesthetized tooth extraction. That I likely have not gotten it.
Four weeks post-op, when I finally break down and email the hiring committee to follow up, I learn that my suspicions are correct.
—
I cannot be sure of how I would be reflecting on all of this if I had gotten that job. I’d probably be very high up on my horse of “I work so hard! I am so diligent! I overcome stuff!” There would be a lot of “I persevered!” self talk, probably, and a reframing of how much pain post-wisdom tooth surgery I was in, how hard basic functioning was, as small stumbling blocks en route to employment glory. But here’s what I do know, having stumbled around in that discomfort and fatigue, having prolonged that misery by pushing myself too hard, too soon: I failed me. Even though I asked for an application extension, I did not use it. I asked for an extension of one day even though I had never been so medicated before and really needed at least two or three. I went back to working full time two days after getting bones drilled and hammered out of my head. I wasn’t eating enough. And ultimately, what I submitted for that writing sample was nowhere near my best work because I simply was not at my best. I know that.
Refusing to give myself the grace of recognizing I was in recovery did me a disservice; picking my list of “shoulds” over “needs” was a betrayal. And while I’m not saying I’ll never choose this same unhealthy path again— odds are very good that I will. Capitalism loves those of us who prostrate ourselves for it— I’d like to think that I won’t. That I’ll get better at respecting myself and my limits, instead of running out onto the train tracks every time, waving my arms, convinced that the oncoming locomotive will slow down just because I’m trying so hard to make it do so. We are conditioned to accept death by train over and over again in our society. But wouldn’t it be nice if we just met the train at the station for once?