I lived for about five years with my upper two wisdom teeth fully descended and the lower two impacted. One of them was at an angle and one corner finally started poking out of the gum. That's when I had the surgery-- had Demerol for the first time and went to Tempe three days later for the Fiesta Bowl with strict instructions not to exert too much pressure when playing my trumpet for fear of blowing out my stitches.

Good times.

Teacher: ....Er...I think you're going to have the last laugh on that one, mate

OK, I think this just made my day (though Dylan's sneeze response was a close second)

Had all four wisdom teeth removed the first Monday of the year when I was a junior in high school--the bottom two were just breaking the surface of the gums and got stuck and the other two never appeared at all.

My sister was on Xmas break from college and had hers done at the same time, but she was able to recover at home for the rest of the week. I had to go back to school the next day only with the morning dosage of pain meds--Mom told me to suck it up and use aspirin, which I managed to forget at home.

When the morning dosage wore off around noon, I was in agony and begging people at school for some aspirin. Finally, a teacher took pity on me and, after swearing me to secrecy, gave me a few Bayer tablets. I think she saved my sanity that day.

P-C, I had that. It got worse and worse as they broke through the gums slowly. Ouch ouch ouch.

Removal and recovery (even with borderline dry socket -- hint: DO NOT OVERFLUSH YOUR MOUTH, ORAL SCABS ARE WHITE, THAT IS NOT TRAPPED FOOD) was superior to the teething pain.

...random work rant deleted...

Hi everybody! Lovely day we're having.

P-C, the fuss and bother of oral surgery is far less than the fuss and bother of an abscessed wisdom tooth plus the fuss and bother of oral surgery.

Sure, because the best solution to fixing the problems with our public school system is for all the parents with other options to pull their kids out of it.

Speaking of knee-jerk reactions, having violent ones to poor judgment on the part of school administrators runs in my family. My dad once dealt with a school's lack of preventing bullying by slamming a baseball bat into the counter of the front office at my sister's school.

Home-schooling is legal; bashing in the head of a school administrator for acting like a Barney Fife in a low-budget women-behind-bars flick probably isn't. I'm just trying to stay out of jail, here.

I just scheduled a consultation for Friday. The dentist I'm seeing is new to the clinic, so I have no idea how he fares on Yelp, but the other dentists and the clinic itself have gotten good reviews.

Hm, I found him. He appears to be much younger than the other dentists. But...I hope he doesn't suck?

Yikes! Good Luck P-C!

Fay, that was awesome. Reminds me of my 1st day of sex ed in 6th grade. Teacher was going through the basics of things, and somehow multiple orgasms came up, and the teacher read off some statistic of how long it takes for a guy to reload and fire again, and the "cool" kid/bully piped up that the stat was BS, and that he can..um..refire.. much faster than that, and I was thinking "huh, something tells me, that's not something you want to brag about". And then a few days later, they taught premature ejaculation, and a number of the class snickered and pointed at "cool"bully kid.

And, a Buffista (if he's not, he should be) explains Easter.

My sister, and several other kids with asthma, who followed the rules and didn't go to the nurse when the teacher said no, ended up in the ER, several times.

Did the nay-saying teachers pay the ER costs? Because that would have been pretty good behavior change reinforcement.

Nope. Depending on which kid is was, either the teacher got a call from the parent or either the nurse or the principal got a call from the parent and then talked to the teacher, but it kept happening.

These were always gym teachers. It was nearly impossible to get a gym teacher to believe you were sick. "I can't breathe, I used my inhaler already and it's not helping, and I need to go to the nurse" was met with "Just sit down for a little while." Several ER visits out of that one, when the kid still couldn't breathe the next period. "I can't run a mile, and I've given you at least three notes from my doctor this semester telling you that I can't run and that you're not allowed to make me do things that I say I can't do" got "Give it a try." That one led to my dislocated knee. "Ouch! That hurts!" when hit in the shoulder during a self-defense class got laughter.

What I had, and what a bunch of other kids had, was a note from a doctor called a self-limiting gym pass. The idea behind this was that it was for kids who can do enough stuff in gym class to not be excused entirely, but for some medical reason can't do everything. And the note says that the kid should tell the teacher if there's something he or she can't do, and then the kid doesn't have to do that thing. Never worked. No matter how many of those notes I brought in, the gym teacher never believed that I wasn't just lazy or faking. There were a few semesters where the teacher was so bad about that stuff that my mom called the doctor to get me a note to get out of gym entirely, but usually, it was just deal with it as well as I could.

Well, they just literally don't understand physical inability and they thought you were babying yourself. But they are not doctors, though.