Drunk Dialing Alert Expired

I issued my "drugged dialing" warning unnecessarily. The valium turned out not to be the happy pill I was promised. Other than the slight fog, I felt nothing unusual, certainly nothing approaching the high I simultaneously looked forward to and feared. I didn't even say anything inappropriate to the cute surgical assistant who fitted my blood pressure monitor.

Unfortunately the local anesthesia didn't work as intended, either. It failed to numb the tooth entirely. The surgeon said that happens with some people and asked if I wanted to reschedule and do it under general. I had intended to do that in the first place until my caring friends at Cigna said that it wouldn't cover general anesthesia for only one tooth.

"Keep going," I told him.

Jesus might have died for my sins but I paid for more than a few of them myself over the next 20 minutes. Complicating things was the hardness of my teeth (one lifetime cavity) and the fact, according to the surgeon, that the roots of wisdom teeth in males are particularly strong. So the tooth was screwing me three ways: It wouldn't go numb, it wouldn't easily break apart and it didn't want to come out.

But eventually it did. I knew the last piece had finally come out when the surgeon started stitching the wound. At least my gums were numb. I didn't feel that at all. The post-op painkiller worked (yay!) and by Friday night I didn't even need to take any more of that. The vicodin didn't make me any more goofy than the valium anyway. My mother explained that to get high from vicodin you have to add acetaminophen. I did not ask how she knows such a thing. The swelling in my jaw made me look like Don Corleone for a couple of days but that's beginning to subside too.

So, yes, the drunk dialing alert has expired. That doesn't mean people shouldn't screen calls from me; it just means that I can't blame the drugs for whatever witless gibberish I utter if they answer.