The Extraction

This may be a little gross but it needs to get out of my head.

He anesthetized and cooed sweet things into me as if preparing a lamb for slaughter. In a few minutes, the decided area of war - gums, left wisdom tooth, upper palette - seemed numb and ready for carnage. That I have faced those drills and hammers and pincers and jacks and needle and knife before made me feel braver and readier than I was. And then I had my gameplan too. I would tell my dentist - my butcher - to relax, play according to the rules, not get charged up as the battle intensified ( because I knew this was going to be a tense, long battle ). And he obliged, smiled, laughed softly at my stress and poured in that maddening light into my face and said aaaaa and I did aaaa and ...

I had decided I'd close my eyes till the enemy played its little game and won. This proved disastrous because with the eyes closed the brain started playing a game of cat and mouse with whatever metal touched my mouth. The jack - because that's all I could think that instrument as, that which helps pull out wheels of a Landrover stuck deep in quicksand - went in first. It touched the gums, did a few tick-tocks with the tooth ( one old Banyan it turned out to be ), and ,umm, started pushing for space between the gum and tooth, trying to, as it turned out, find the roots of the tree. The roots were firmly, firmly rooted and soon my Ripper found out just pushing and playing with the jack wasn't going to be enough. The pincers grasped the tooth next. And as if it really was a tree, started to shake it, with the jack between the gum and tooth, pushing it down. The bloodbath, as I had anticipated, had begun. The noises around the room drowned into a vacuum and my head formed its own noises - shrill, unbearable noises - of images. I shut my eyes tight as a chicken shrieked, someone twisted its neck and then separated it from its body - its body writhing, a gloved hand tore my face at the jaws, a crowd beat up a young man, blood all over him and Holocaust and a hundred grotesque devils raped a young girl and and ... You think I am  exaggerating.

The pincers pushed and pulled at the tooth, the jack pushed it down and tears made a steady stream from the side of my eyes and blood, made thicker with saliva, oozed slowly from the side of the mouth as cotton ball erased its path now and then leaving just the dry outline of the stream. A piece of teeth withered between the jaws of the pincers, so they gripped even closer to the gums. Pull-push-push-pull ( oh I could tell how it would be to be in labor ). And click! Blood! Blood! Blood!

And we were done. The battle was over, the battlefield a bloody mess.

As it turns out, your senses go into overdrive in times of pain. It becomes sensitive to sound the way a person with an extreme case of leukemia is to sunlight. The most effective way to ease pain is to first quieten the noises in the head. And for that there could possibly be no better tool than music. But suppose you plugged in the headphones and your player played one of those louder songs with a lot of lyrics and which you love to listen to when you are 'normal' ? Bleeding again! That does not mean to say any classical, soft, slow, music would kiss the pain away. No. The trick is to avoid anything vocal. Human beings are no good when it comes to easing of pains. Violins, sitars and pianos - Ravi Shankar, L Subramanian or Bach. And no Beethoven. Just...Just avoid Beethoven.