Visions and Revisions

On Wednesday I got two of my wisdom teeth removed. I wish I had something to show for it, but I don't, but it isn't for lack of trying. They wouldn't let me keep the teeth, some sort of malarkey about a biohazard, whatever. And then my plot to take some really gruesome photos of my stitches and bleeding gums ran aground on the fact that the new holes in my head are on the upper storey of my mouth. Juggling a headlamp, a small mirror, and a camera proved too much of a struggle--especially when simultaneously trying not to breathe and fog up the mirror--so the world has been spared visual evidence of my toothlessness. But I assure you it's ugly! Monstrous!

The hardest part of this whole experience isn't the extraction, or the aftermath, or even paying the bill--it's the RULES! They gave me a dreadful long list of Thou Shalt Nots before I stumbled out the door, and given my powerful aversion to forking over more money to the medical men, I have done my very best to abide by them. Seems like anybody who doesn't have a horror story about their extractions has a horror story about a dry socket. No straws, no smoking, no spitting, no sneezes if you can help it; rinsing gently at least six times a day with mouthwash or salt water; no vigorous exercise; no very hot or very cold food or beverages; and nothing crunchy, chewy, crisp, stringy, sticky, gummy, or requiring any more mastication than the pressing of your tongue to the roof of your mouth.

I have a sneaking suspicion that this last is much easier to follow when you are hopped up on generous doses of Vicodin and spending a few days after surgery vegetating on the couch. But I went back to work the morning after, and apart from a bruised feeling that you'd expect from getting a [removable] bone neatly torn from your face, it's been a pain-free three days, and business as usual. This means I'm hungry! Soup, scrambled eggs, oatmeal and yogurt are neither satisfying nor interesting. I'd give darn near anything for a nice chewy ciabatta and an apple. And some HOT coffee.

But I reiterate that as of this writing the extraction sites are still as ugly as hell and do not bear the smallest resemblance to healed gum tissue, and it's a good thing that I know I don't know anything about dentistry or I'd think they were both terribly infected. Possibly I am looking at the blood clot that my list of rules is so keen to preserve. But you might say I'm a little jumpy about it. They don't hurt, but they leave a strange taste in my mouth, and last night I woke up several times thinking my mouth was bleeding profusely, only to find I was merely drooling all over my pillow.

I bought a few cans of V8. And my skin won't thank me for it later, but cooled hot chocolate is always at hand. Another few days on a mostly liquid diet won't kill me, but I never realized how much store I set by food with TEXTURE.

The actual visit to the oral surgeon took half an hour at most, and was vastly less traumatic than everyone ominously foretold. An hour before my appointment I took one of these fancy little anxiety-inhibitor pills, Lorazepam, and by the time I arrived at the office I had only the vaguest memory of walking there, I might have floated in the door on pink clouds. They sat me down in a lean-back chair, hooked me into one of those blue bib-things, and took my blood pressure and pulse while I cheerfully signed waiver after waiver with increasingly freestyle initials. After a few minutes the surgeon arrived, examined my teeth briefly, and enquired about my general state of being. The assistant told him my pulse, which for some reason was tremendously funny to everyone in the room. They dabbed something on each tooth (an adhesive?), gave me three shots of anesthetic in each side of my mouth, I think, and then everyone sat back on their heels and studied me closely for a moment. I might have been humming at that point, and looked at everyone inquiringly.

"Do you feel alright?"

"Yep!"

"You don't feel like you're going to pass out?"

"Nope!" They probably could have sawn my nose off without my giving it a second thought.

A minute elapsed and the surgeon said alright, let's get this finished, and one assistant kind of cradled my head from behind, another held a mirror and suction tube, and the dentist warned me that I would feel a lot of pushing, but I shouldn't feel any kind of pain. I daresay I was quite comfortable, apart from having a lot of metal instruments in my mouth. There was a crunching kind of noise and there went my tooth! Ha ha! The left one (which hadn't erupted as far) left a root behind, which they had to fish out (another twenty seconds, perhaps), and the right one came away perfectly cleanly. Ha! The dentist hardly had time to stitch up the holes in my gums and stick some gauze in my mouth before he was off to his next appointment, and I sat up demanding to see my teeth, where are my teeth, can I take them home, my teeth!

The assistant parked me in a quiet room and asked me if someone had come with me. I said no, but my brother was coming to fetch me. Her response was phrased in such a way as to make me giggle inwardly, because clearly they had no notion that Si would be walking me back home again. But that was my little secret! I kept wandering to the door in order to peek in the waiting room--how else would anyone know if Si was there?--and was summarily ushered back to my seat, burbling something about "tall" and "blond hair" through a mouthful of gauze. The assistant came and went a couple of times to change out the gauze in my mouth, and to deliver the dreadful sheet of rules for me to sign, and then one of the secretaries popped her head in. For whatever strange reason, perhaps she was well accustomed to conversing with the medicated, she put one forefinger across her upper lip and said, "Your brother, does he have a mustache?"

"Yosh!" I replied jubilantly, imitating her gesture. "A boshtashe!"

One of the first lesson sets in my ninth-grade art class focused on Henri Matisse, the French artist who pioneered Fauvism around the turn of the twentiety century. I had a hell of a time imitating or even appreciating his cut-paper style--it was one of Mr Krauchi's many failed attempts to improve my sense of composition--but when Mom came home with a brightly-colored, energetic kitten that October, it didn't take long for me to dub our beautiful new "wild beast" Matisse.


And it seems that she was well named, because Matisse found her way into most of my artistic endeavors. Black and white photography suited her striking markings well; black and white drawings even more so. As Dad never tires of remembering, she once walked across an oil painting that I had foolishly set out to dry on the floor, and left a trail of paw-prints that were a hundred times prettier than the painting itself. The bulk of my AP Studio portfolio, put together during a hectic and sleepless three-day drawing marathon, concentrated on my ever-present model; and even my senior thesis was not complete without the inclusion of my feline alter-ego.



She had kittens once--three very different babies that we dubbed Chaos, Phaeton, and Cezanne--before we got her spayed. After the kittens found new homes (in their various fashions) we spent a while looking for a companion for Matisse, and eventually we wound up with Morgan, a runty black kitten with huge yellow eyes. Morgan never quite outgrew her kittenish ways, but turned into a massive cat and positively adored Matisse, who would have none of it. They were a bit like the Odd Couple of the feline world; Matisse never lost a chance to grouse that Morgan was breathing loudly or crowding her peripheral vision, but every so often you'd find them sleeping within the same ten feet of one another.

In 2002, my family and I returned from a weekend trip to Heidelberg and found Matisse lying in the grass in front of the house. We never found out what had happened, or how long she had been lying there--she may have been kicked, attacked by a dog, hit by a car, who knows--but her hip was broken, and she had dragged herself home. We fully expected to have to put her down--any American vet wouldn't have thought twice, given the extent of the damage and the unlikelihood that Matisse would ever walk again--but the German vet carefully put our girl back together, and returned her to us. I don't think any of us expected that she would recover as completely as she did; until quite recently, she rarely evidenced signs of stiffness or pain, or favored one leg over the other. We liked to joke about her titianium hip, her lead bottom. She was our Miracle Cat!


I think we all knew, however, that the kind of trauma she had survived had likely shortened her life. For perhaps a year now, one of the cats had been peeing in the bath tub instead of the litterbox, an anomaly that Mom and Dad hadn't been able to puzzle out. A few months ago Mom mentioned that Matisse was getting very skinny, a sure sign that something was amiss because Matisse was a cat who clamored loudly for her treats every morning, and would sell her soul for a lick of cream cheese. A few weeks ago she couldn't hold her food down any longer, and when Mom and Dad took her to the vet he reported that Matisse's kidneys were failing. When Kim and I visited New York last weekend Matisse was a scarecrow of the spoiled cat-princess I was used to seeing. She seemed pleased to see me and happy to be petted and coddled, but all of the fight had gone out of her. It seemed to me that in the quietly definitive way of cats, she'd made her decision. So it came as no surprise last night when Mom called and said they'd gotten home to find Matisse curled up to sleep in a quiet corner.


We'll miss you, Teazer.
1999-2009

Well well well. Kim has been set along her merry way home, where she might spend the next three days scraping the mold off her person. Since I decided that it would be too confusing to back-track and post about her visit before I post about all the other developments of the past three weeks, here is a sweeping account of current events.

Silas graduated. Congratulations, Si!

I now have a driver's permit for Massachusetts. This makes the fourth or fifth permit I've acquired over the years, and I just walked in and took the test cold turkey. I've totally got the theory down, I just haven't ever learned to manipulate an automobile in real time. But this time it's really going to happen! I am determined! This girl is getting her license before she is a quarter century old, that's a promise.

Speaking of licenses, the hearing for the chocolate factory's oven license took place on Tuesday, with inconclusive results. The second hearing is scheduled for the 23rd of June, and I sincerely hope that the morning of the 24th will find our kitchen back in full operation. I'm tired of walking the croissants to the restaurant up the street every morning at ridiculous o'clock, and the mice and I long ago exchanged all that could be said between us. Now there's nothing but awkward silences.

I visited the oral surgeon a while back, and this next Wednesday he is going to remove my top two wisdom teeth. People here are very preoccupied with insurance; he seriously didn't want to have to charge me for general anesthetic and the full surgery costs of removing impacted third molars, and suggested that I wait to deal with the unerupted teeth until 1) they start to bother me, or 2) I have dental insurance that will cover it. As it is, he has agreed to do an extraction of the top two. I even got a prescription for anti-anxiety medication to take prior to surgery. The pharmacist that it will make me very C A L M. Fun stuff. Maybe the dentist will let me keep my ivories, and I can make a necklace! Or earrings!

I'm fighting an ongoing battle with the local vets about getting Scout spayed. The poor cat is in heat almost all the time, and spends the five days to two weeks between estrus cycles in a state of such deliberate maliciousness that it's like living with a schizophrenic. And she seems to spend a lot more time lurking suspiciously in doorways. Sooner or later she's going to figure out that Luther is waiting for her! Right outside! And there is no way in hell that Scout's little body will be able to support a pregnancy. So at this point, as I have made clear to anyone who will listen, we're just going to have to gamble on getting her spayed. If she dies, well...a year ago they told me she was doomed, and I honestly didn't expect to take her home after our little adventure last October, so at least it won't come as a surprise. So far all the vets I've talked to have been dragging their feet, either referring me to another clinic or refusing flat-out to perform the surgery. The funny thing is that if I asked them to euthanize her, given her medical history, they wouldn't ask twice. But ask them to do a common parlor trick with full knowledge that it may end in disaster, and suddenly nobody wants the job. I am reluctant to take Scout to one of those low-cost, walk-in spay clinics that will ask no questions, because if she dies on the operating table they might wind up with all sorts of legal problems, and they offer such an important service to the animal community that I don't want to jeopardize it. But it may yet come to that.

And if you've been paying attention, you might have noticed a certain wrapping-up-loose-ends trend underlying my summer activities. Since it is all official now, I am able to announce that Mom has accepted a posting in Fairbanks, Alaska. They pack out the third week of July, and she reports for work August 1.

I have always wanted to live in Alaska, and I will never have another opportunity to move there with so little expense or inconvenience as under the present circumstances. The lease on this house is up at the end of the summer, and I have no reason to stay. As much as I still enjoy my job, it isn't all-engrossing, and I'm getting mildly frustrated earning only ten dollars an hour in a city that gobbles my paycheck with its eyes closed. So I'm moving! My books are already culled (again) and packed, and after the fourth of July they, along with the heavier belongings that I can't bear to part with, will quietly insinuate themselves into Mom and Dad's household goods. The rest will be sold, abandoned, mailed, or packed into suitcases. Scout and I will get a plane ticket and crash on Mom and Dad's floor until we can find a cabin of our own. I have a good feeling about this move.