Go ahead and water the lawn

2005-03-17 - 6:40 p.m.

I know you are all as excited as heck to hear about the state of my gums. Not to worry, I'm here to update you. They're doing ok. For starters, I am now capable of using a spoon. This is a big step. Still can't actually chew, but I guess I'll take what I can get at this point.

The roof of my mouth is definitely improving. First thing I did this morning, though, was mess with it and cause myself a lot of pain. See, when I got out of bed this morning, I removed my mouth guard and some clumps of congealed blood were hanging from the roof of my mouth. I tried to rinse them out and some of them came away easily, but most didn't, especially since my rinsing was far from vigorous. So I reached in and grabbed the biggest dangling clump with my fingers. And then I pulled. Holy shit I'm a dumbass. It hurt so badly I nearly puked and passed out. Next thing I knew I was sitting on my bathroom floor bleeding profusely. I managed to get myself cleaned up in time to go to work, but I was nauseated and in pain all morning. But that went away around lunch time. Now it's looking pretty good. I just recently took another picture of the roof of my mouth (which I will share here) and you can see the little chunk on the picture's left side that's missing from where I pulled it. But other than that it looks good. It helps that it's not bleeding. It's still tender enough that when I take my mouth guard out I can't even swallow, but with the mouth guard in, it's good.

As for the gums themselves, well, they look horrible. Yesterday I looked like Frankenstein's monster, today I look like a zombie. I was really worried that the graft wasn't taking so I called up my periodontist during my lunch break today. She had never actually told me how it should look afterwards while it's healing. She told me that the outermost layer of skin doesn't get any blood supply so it will look very white and it will slough off. If there's one word that grosses me out, it's sloughing. At any rate, white and sloughing is an accurate desciption of my gums now. I will share this picture of my gums with you but be warned that it's really disgusting. I also discovered while I was at work today that it hurts quite a bit to smile. And I seem to smile a lot. I'm very thankful that when I smile my gums don't show.

At any rate, other than this morning's bout of stupidity induced nausea, I've been feeling pretty good. In fact, Kitten invited me to go rockclimbing with her this evening and I've decided to go. I've never been rockclimbing before. Hopefully I can manage it!