health

Uggh. Today has been misery punctuated by mere discomfort, and you won't get anything profound from me tonight. What time I didn't spend in bed with Aero's butt in my armpit and QBit lying across my ankles I spent reading in my big chair, pulling Kleenexes from the box as needed and tossing them atop my desk when I finished with them. A few minutes ago, I looked at the pile of snotty Kleenex and asked myself, “Did I do all that nose-blowing this afternoon?” I was so bleary I barely remember.

Yet objective evidence (the head-sized pile of snotty tissues) suggests that I did.

And on that note I will make a very strong recommendation for the book I am mostly through reading, though I will probably have to read it a second time once I'm no longer blissed out on antihistamines. Do not miss this one: Mistakes Were made, But Not By Me, by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. (Thanks to Michael Abrash for recommending the book.) It is a masterful piece of pop psychology, beautifully written and well footnoted, that offers to explain why we justfy foolish beliefs, bad decisions, and hurtful behavior. It has been a painful read in that I have seen myself in every other paragraph, and you will too. It has been a hopeful read, however, in that I have been intuitively struggling against these damaging psychological mechanisms for much of my adult life; in fact, the book has allowed me to define what I mean by contrarianism: the act of swimming against the torrent of stupidity and falsehood that flows from the deeper mind.

If you are a person given to certainty, the book will enrage you, since it almost defines certainty as a species of mental illness. (This is also the thesis of another book that I have read but not yet reviewed here, On Being Certain, by Robert A. Burton.) No matter what you're certain about, you're wrong. So am I. All knowledge is tentative, and our memories are full of holes and scrambled pointers. I'll start talking about that once I feel better and this damned election is over.

At this point it's time for shower and bed, and my nose is running. Damn. I'm out of Kleenex. I was sure that the box was still half-full!

The massive urban renewal project that is the inside of my mouth got into high gear again this morning, with what I call a three-p procedure: It took six hours, with three pee breaks, and (I am not exaggerating !) fifteen separate injections of local anaesthetic. Uggh. The surgeon removed my lower horseshoe, which has been in my mouth since September 2001, and cleaned up what damage had occurred during seven years in place. Two fillings had to be drilled out and replaced, and all the teeth had to be re-margined. One tooth, while not infected, had broken into three pieces underneath the horeshoe (probably due to my perpetual clenching and grinding during the night) and no longer has enough structure above the gum line to be retained. It will have to be pulled, and later this year (once the bone heals) an implant post will be put in place to carry the eventual crown.

So here I am at home, groggy on painkillers, watching out my window as a blizzard rages on the slopes of my mountain. What month is this again? We already have four inches out there and it's still coming down hard. A friend at church told us that this has been the wettest, coldest, longest winter he's seen the whole sixteen years he's lived here.

And tomorrow morning at 7, I go back for six more hours to accomplish a similar treatment on the uppers. Alas, the upper horeshoe is in pretty tight (a good thing, actually, for my teeth's sake these past seven years) and the surgeon will have to cut it out in chunks using diamond burrs. (I'll be tasting stainless steel for weeks.)

But to the story at hand: I asked the young dental surgical assistant if I could have the lower horseshoe back so I could put it on my curio shelf. She said sure, and asked what else I had on the shelf. I ran down the short-form list:

• A horse vertebra.
• A cow skull that wears my Lane Tech high school mortarboard.
• A radio-controlled rat.
• A Pope Benedict XVI bobble-head.
• A stuffed squirrel that giggles when you press his tummy.
• A meteorite fragment given me by Pete Albrecht.
• A Giant Squid action figure.
• A Tim-Bird ornithopter
• My father's slide rule.

She smiled, nodded, and then asked, “What's a slide rule?”

I explained as best I could. I realized that this was the other kind of Fifties Moment; that is, when you realize that you're in your fifties and almost everybody else isn't. I ache for the day—though I will probably not live to see it—when graying Gen-Y fiftysomethings talk about their vintage gear collection, and some young punk asks, in all sincerity: “What's an iPod?”

Figgered I'd surface for a few words; I'm between pain pills and can think a little bit. However, my face is badly swollen and I've lost three pounds in as many days, largely because eating requires the detailed use of your mouth.

Before the surgery, the medical office handed me pages of fine print about the procedure and its aftermath, which I skimmed, as it was depressing. However, it was true in an interesting respect: The worst doesn't come until three days after the procedure itself. In truth, I was so sedated that I no longer remember much about being in the chair and getting worked on. And the first and second days weren't too bad. But this morning, mon dieu…

And there it was, in the fine print: Swelling peaks on the third or fourth day post-surgery. Now, I'm no Hugh Grant and don't care that much how I look, short-term. But swelling hurts.

So I'm reading, daydreaming, and lying on my back in bed being bored. I'll report more when I can think clearly enough to report on something.