Star Wars: The Prescient Review

Joel (hip cat at work) gave his prescient review of Star Wars:
"It will be like a bad porn movie: bad dialog for a few action shots."

The Day of Lidocaine

I got shot today. Three times. With Lidocaine.

It started with my ear. I was in for surgery to remove the bit of anatomy that has been responsible for my ear infections. It sounds a lot more dramatic and scary, but in reality it was mostly just painful when it happened. So the ENT Doc thought he had gotten most of out on this last, 4th round of an infection, I wasn't really in the mood for it again, so he cut it out. The surgery suite was in an innocuous office building -- you would never expect that liposuction, nose jobs and other minor day surgeries were happening inside.

Despite my surgery only requiring local anesthetic, I got the full surgery treatment. Heart rate monitor. Pulse Ox monitor. Nekkid under my flappy gown (well, I did get to wear underwear). A grounding wire attached to my side via a huge cold, sticky pad should I go into cardiac arrest during surgery. They even made me take off my ring.

The nurse, doctor, doctor's assistant and medical student had a gay old time during my surgery. The staff clearly love Dr. Siegel -- slightly eccentric, but really nice and very competent. So I was spread out on a hospital surgery table, head to the side, draped in sterile blue plastic clothpaper, head swabbed with benadyne. I felt nothing except the initial prick-sting of the lidocaine shot.

Then, later in the day, I had a tooth drilled. I got shot twice there because the first didn't take, and the dentist was quite adamant about me being really numb. Drooling-out-of-the-side-of-my-mouth numb. And so I was.

Chunks of my old filling went flying once they started drilling - the dentist couldn't find it. (I did -- on my other side of my mouth) It took over 2 hours to get it all done and put away, but I finally walked away with the enter lower left side of my face feeling like shoe leather.

Time to lay off the colas.