Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [40]
I was breathless with the shock and violating horror of this sudden mouthal rape. It was a total Central Park Jogger moment, and I was feeling very close to blacking out. I willed myself to stay awake—in exactly the same way that I will the plane to stay aloft while flying—because if I did go unconscious, I had a feeling he might be so focused on his excavation that he wouldn’t even notice.
And then just as suddenly as he had begun, he was closing me back up, stitching the roof of my mouth back in place, pulling out the great wads of deeply bloody gauze that had somehow been stuffed in there. Then he was stuffing more fresh gauze back in.
He had me up and out of the chair a few minutes later, and he was tucking a prescription into my hand. “We’ll have the results of the biopsy sometime next week,” he said, “so call maybe Wednesday, Thursday.” Like we had tentative dinner plans, not like I had possible oral cancer. Noticing my alarm, he added, “Don’t worry. A biopsy is just standard procedure.” And I thought, that’s exactly how all horrible things begin: with those words “standard procedure.”
An hour later at home, a dull, thrumming sensation began, like an awareness under my nose. Was this the tip of excruciating pain carving a hole into my Novocain cloud?
My mind kept replaying the surgery. I was powerless to stop the movie in my head. Only now, my brain added visuals to what before were only sensations. Where I had felt the roof of my mouth being carved open and pulled forward, now I could see it. I could see inside the bloody hole, too. Over and over, these images played, a loop of gore. Many people have a fear of the dentist. Because they are terrified that exactly this will happen to them. Everybody knows that dentists are capable of great destruction, but few people actually experience it. At that moment, I would have traded two impacted wisdom teeth and a gingivectomy just to be free of my internal horror movie.
I had gauze pressed firmly against the roof of my mouth, and I kept worrying that when I pulled it out, the skin would stick to it and I’d end up with the roof of my mouth in the palm of my hand.
Looking in the mirror, I saw thick black stitches tied around my front teeth like ropes around a dock. The roof of my mouth was anchored to my teeth; otherwise it would collapse onto my tongue.
I thought, I am not ever going to get liposuction, a nose job, or pec implants. Nor am I going to get that new dick-enlargement surgery.
No elective surgery. Ever.
I wished I could fast-forward three weeks into the future. Or at least eight days, when the stitches would be out.
How was I gong to walk around in public with these ropes tied around my teeth? Thick, black ropes. Holding the roof of my mouth in place.
Imagine, I thought to myself, what a transsexual must go through.
I stayed home from work the next day because of my “roof work.” I couldn’t eat anything, but that didn’t matter because I discovered that I liked codeine. I looked forward to taking it and wished I had more pills. A year or two’s supply. It felt like such a gentle lift. I could easily get addicted. Unless I already was.
Codeine became the highlight of my day, if not my thirties. If the doctor had given me more than twenty pills I most certainly would have taken them all, right down to the cotton in the bottle. And then I would have brewed tea from that.
I took two more pills on top of the previous two that I had taken a few hours before. I wasn’t taking them for pain now but for pleasure. If a person has to have parts of his head split open with an X-Acto knife, it only seemed fair that he should then get to have some fun.
I felt like ordering Chinese food, but I was kind of afraid to eat anything until the following day. I didn’t want to stretch the sutures or get debris lodged up into the roof of my mouth. The last thing I needed was to live the rest of my life with a small nugget of General Tso’s chicken tucked somewhere inside my head.
I decided to take one more codeine to make up for my starvation.