I ventured back to the oral surgeon today so they could remove the gauze packed in my gum holes. Over the weekend I was sure that the gauze had slipped out and been swallowed, so the clinic nurse did an x-ray and confirmed my suspicions. The x-ray showed nothing but ghost teeth, empty tooth-shaped holes in the bone where my wisdom teeth used to be.
I went back to work and ate lunch, gingerly taking tiny bites out of a sandwich and chewing them with my front teeth, trying not to get chunks of bread and lunchmeat stuck in my holey maw. Something was scraping up against the roof of my mouth so I reached in and caught it. Gauze. Six inches of bloody, gooey gauze scraped out of the left side hole in my mouth. I nearly fainted. Woozy and irritated I took some pain medication to dull the ache developing on the left side of my head and wondered about the other side. Was the gauze still in there?
Tonight I took a flashlight and some tweezers into the bathroom and inspected my teeth as best I could. And there it was, a little white tab sticking out behind the last tooth on the right. The tweezers won’t reach it even though I tried. Oh, how I tried.
Why try to remove it?
But why was there gauze in there? I guess it’s different for everybody…I didn’t get any gauze after my wisdom teeth were removed. I didn’t eat anything either…just lots of liquids and yogurt and things like that.
The gauze won’t biodegrade so they have to remove it now or go in later and cut it out.
Oh, I figured removing it would be something your dentist would do.
How are you healing so far?
That reminds me of yesterday when we had to tweezer out the gauze in on of my patients stage 4 necrotic gangrenous pressure ulcer. Not a pretty sight.
Mmmmm. Gangrenous pressure ulcer.