When my wife, then girlfriend, was in college she began to experience sudden pain in her jaw for several days. After trying several different pain relief medications she went to the dentist. As it turned out, her wisdom teeth, which had been coming in for a few years had finally reached the point where there just wasn’t enough room for them anymore. The dentist suggested that she live with the pain for a few months and eventually her mouth would adjust, but create tighter gaps between all her other teeth, or she could come back in for wisdom teeth extraction.
My wife chose to have her wisdom teeth removed and scheduled an appointment with a dental surgeon. I drove her to the appointment that morning and waited in the lobby. I was told that the entire surgery would consist of removing each wisdom tooth and then packing the void left by the removal of each tooth. The surgery would only take two hours and my wife could leave immediately afterwards and go home. After my fill of reading the newspaper and other magazines my wife eventually stumbled out of the office, cheeks swollen and she was ready to go.
The drive home was an interesting one as my wife was still partially sedated. She drunkenly kept thanking me for taking her and said she was so glad I took her. The entire was home was quite amusing. Once I got her home she went right to bed and slept off the rest of the anesthesia. When she woke up she quickly found that one of the gauze packs had come loose and she was bleeding quite severely. We called the dentist and he calmly told us that one of the clots must have come out. He instructed us to pack it with gauze and hold it steady for 30 minutes. This would not have been a problem, except for the fact that my wife began vomiting at some point, thus making it impossible to keep the gauze in. A few hours went by with my wife vomiting and bleeding. Eventually she stopped being sick and we were able to get the gauze packs inserted and the bleeding stopped.
All in all, my wife was glad to have her wisdom teeth out, but she did not enjoy her experience. We learned that day that she gets sick from anesthesia. We didn’t blame the dentist. The surgery went well, but my wife reacted poorly. I compare this to my wisdom teeth experience, which went surprisingly well and I would recommend to all just to be prepared for the worse, but having your wisdom teeth removed really is not a bad experience. Getting them removed saved us a lot of pain in the long run.