Ted, Ted, Ted

Had my wisdom teeth taken out Friday afternoon, all four of them. I feel like an idiot, letting the dental vultures talk me into this when I’ve made it this long without the slightest trouble. But I happen to have full dental coverage right now, and there’s no way to tell how long that will last, and there’s always the chance that the dentist is right and something terrible will happen if this lucrative (for the dentist) procedure is not performed right now. Experience teaches that bad dental stuff always happens when you don’t have insurance to pay for it. So I let them incapacitate the lower half of my head and root around in there for about an hour. Afterward, remembering how much fun it was getting caught on a weekend with insufficient painkillers after a root-canal party a few years ago (we spent half a night in an emergency room waiting for a doctor to take 30 seconds for a second prescription), I made the dentist prescribe 50 percent more Vicodin than he thought necessary. That stuff works pretty well, but I found that good old Ibuprofen is just as effective, and comes without the nasty reputation. I think I’ll give the leftover Vicodin back. I don’t need to be any stoneder than I usually am.