At the end of July, I got three wisdom teeth pulled. I am the world’s #1 wuss, so going into this whole experience I was really nervous. The night before, I looked up all kinds of videos on YouTube and articles online about other people getting their wisdom teeth extracted and the horror stories that came with it.

Wasn’t a very good idea, obviously.

My mom and dad both came with me to the doctor’s office. I was really embarrassed because after the nurse took me back into the rooms, I started crying. Yeah, I was a nervous wreck. I remember laying down in the chair and the doctor coming in and introducing himself to me. He then gave me the shot to put me to sleep and I remember thinking, “This is not going to knock me out!” It took a few minutes, but the next thing I know I was waking up and there were balls of gauze in my mouth and no wisdom teeth.

I don’t remember anything at all about the surgery; I felt nothing – which was amazing. They moved me to a recovery room and had me lay down and try to regain my balance. After a few minutes, they got my parents and had me walk around a little bit to make sure I was okay. They then gave me general instructions about what I could and could not do and told me to come back in a week to get the stitches out of my bottom left gum.

On the ride home, I didn’t feel too bad. I wasn’t loopy or anything from the anesthesia (to my mom’s disappointment) and I was immensely relieved. I had heard all kinds of crazy things that people say when they wake back up. Once I got home, the medicine really started to wear off and my mouth started to hurt. So I took my meds, crawled in bed, put an ice pack on my face and fell asleep. At dinner, my mom woke me and made me eat a smoothie, I took more meds, and went back to sleep on the sofa in the living room.

My brother had one of his friends over, so that woke me up later and I was really feeling kind of bad. My stomach hurt, my mouth hurt, just that awful miserable feeling. Like I was going to throw up. So my mom was trying to convince me to eat something else, which I really didn’t want to because I knew I would just hork it back up; but against my better judgement I drank some gatorade. And threw it up.

The pain medicine they had me on made me extremely sick, so the rest of the night I spent just throwing up. After that I decided that I would just take some general, over-the-counter pain pills and that still killed most of the pain but didn’t make me sick.

The first couple of days were really the worst, just because my mouth was achy and I could only eat smoothies and yogurt. I also just had this really bad taste in my mouth that wouldn’t go away because I wasn’t allowed to rinse my mouth. It was a combination of general bad breath, blood, and… something just disgusting. And my cheeks did get really puffy. I told you I’d look like a puffer fish.

The pain was tolerable, which isn’t bad since again, I am the world’s #1 Wuss. I probably wouldn’t have had any at all if I would have stayed on my original medicine. And after the first week, I had minimal pain and could eat more solid food on the right side of my mouth. (I didn’t have the bottom tooth on the right pulled because WOOT! I didn’t have one! So the top right healed fairly quickly and I could eat more solid foods on that side.)

Now, almost three weeks later, I’m doing just fine. No problems really. I have to be careful still with chewing on the left side of my mouth because the bottom left one is still a little touchy, but I’m eating chips and apples and all that good stuff. It was terrible, not being able to eat all my favorite junk food!

So my advice to those that are nervous about getting theirs pulled or will have to sometime in the future: don’t sweat it. Yeah, the first couple of days kinda suck, but you just sleep through most of it and the pain meds do wonders.