As soon as I posted about my current and past stitches, I got messages from my relatives across a variety of media. My cousin commented on Facebook in response to my blog post, “Maybe you should not have dove into the shallow end of the pool…. Just saying” (thanks for the support!) while my mom texted me to say “Did you also have stitches for wisdom teeth…? I’ll never tell” (thanks for the…subterfuge?).
I don’t remember much about having my wisdom teeth out–no, that’s a lie. I remember pretty much everything, from the cowboy boots the oral surgeon was wearing to the last thing I said before the laughing gas pulled me under (something like “Take me with you!” when the doctor mentioned Florida) to the disappointment when, waking from the anesthesia, I felt “normal” (in contrast to my friend–of toothpick-in-the-arm fame–who said the most hilarious things when she emerged drooling and puffy from her wisdom tooth removal). (I couldn’t talk, so on the drive home I tried to mmmphhh mmppphhh mmmphh to my mom all about how I didn’t feel weird at all, and finally she handed me my dad’s atlas and a pen…and when I looked back later, I had drawn a bunch of random lines.)
A little Google research shows that oral surgeons sometimes put in dissolvable stitches and other times they don’t need to…just as some doctors (like mine) prescribe Vicodin (I only took it for the first couple of days, but the main effect I remember is that when I woke up on my couch, I felt like my hands and feet were in all different corners of the room) and others prescribe Tylenol. I probably had stitches when my wisdom teeth were taken out, which would make them my third set of stitches and ruin my attempt at a fibonacci-esque pattern of stitch getting…or we could just say that since I don’t remember and there’s no way to know, I can still claim 1, 2, and 3 stitches on a technicality.
Technicalities are also what allow me to say I’ve never had a broken bone. I most likely broke my big toe on a trampoline when I was eleven, but I never went to the doctor so I can’t say for sure. I can only say that my toe swelled up right before our family vacation to Gatlinburg and it made donning my water socks VERY difficult, so I was the most grumpy creek-explorer of the 10 or so kids on that vacation (which was not actually my family vacation, but my friend’s family’s (yes, toothpick friend)). In college, I possibly broke my middle finger playing flag football, which resulted in me playing an orchestra concert as the harpist flipping everyone the bird with her silver finger splint. That time I *did* go to the doctor and had an x-ray…which turned out to be inconclusive because the radiologist couldn’t tell if the dark line she saw was a hairline fracture or a vein. (My roommate broke her middle finger–on the opposite hand–two days later, by dropping her bed frame on it–it was not a good time to be a hand in our household).
In conclusion: inconclusive.
But my tongue is starting to look like a regular tongue again.
