Went to the dentist at GH on Wednesday to have my lower right wisdom tooth extracted. Apparently it was infected so the sooner out, the better. Usually the process of extracting wisdom teeth is quick, but it so happened that mine was horizontally impacted, ie angled 90 degrees forward and growing into the second molar. And guess what, according to Wikipedia there is only a 3% chance of this happening. Yup, three percent. Lucky me. You can read all about it here.

The dentist himself told me that it would be a complicated operation, thanks to the way the tooth had grown. Basically he injected my gum to make it go numb (sigh, no general anesthetic), sawed/drilled away half my jawbone to reach the root, then yanked the tooth out and stitched up the hole. The whole procedure took about 30 minutes. Thank goodness he let me listen to music. Even so, the high-pitched whine of the drill could still be heard even with the volume maxed. And even with the area numbed down, there still was a considerable amount of pain.

I've been living on blended porridge, water and antibiotics ever since, and will probably continue to do so for the next few days. Couldn't even talk after the operation, had a huge piece of gauze in my mouth to absorb the blood oozing from the wound. "Don't rinse your mouth," the dentist said. "If saliva collects in your mouth, just swallow it. Can't be helped lah." The whole day i was swallowing a mixture of saliva, blood and pus every 15 minutes. Trust me, it doesn't taste nice. At least the bleeding stopped that night and I could go to sleep without that infernal piece of gauze in my mouth.

Was looking for the mp3 of Tchaikovsky's 5th Symphony online yesterday; we're doing that at the next MPYO camp. I took a casual glance at the score when I noticed 'Klarinette I in A' printed at the top left corner. It then hit me that I was playing 1st clarinet, the camp starts next week, and I haven't even started practising. Thanks to the operation, I won't be practicing anytime soon either. Sweet. I am so screwed.