My tooth socket continues to be pain in the ass. I go again to have it scraped out and cleaned tomorrow. Hopefully for the last time. I went over a month ago when the flesh inside my empty tooth socket got so swollen it was poking out of the top of the tooth socket. Imagine a big mixing bowl with a small dough ball at the bottom, then imagine the dough's risen and it's puffy and fluffed out of the top of the bowl. And the oral surgeon has to rip all that dough out of the bowl. That was my tooth socket about a month ago.

It's been interesting to me this saga of oral surgeons these past 2.5 months. I chose an oral surgeon because I knew someone who'd used him before -- you can't just cold call a dentist! And he was fine and nice and his office staff was great, the surgery assistant was cute and extremely nice -- as were the other assistants. But then he failed to call me back when I was most anxious (about the dough ball in my socket) and now I wouldn't trust him to clean my teeth, much less rip them out of my head.

I went to the on-site dentist at work as an emergency -- I wasn't sure if I was supposed to be worried about my tooth hole or not. She pulled out a sharp pointy thing and my hands leapt up of their own accord to cover my mouth, and I was just as suprised as she was. She promised she wouldn't hurt me and I dropped my hands. She kept her promise and recommended Dr. Joseph S Kim, DMD. He is awesome. I can't recommend him enough. It's funny because my mom dragged my sister off to Korean doctors and dentists with mixed results so I was sort of wary of going to see him for the first time, but I was immediataely sold. I've never seen such happy office staff -- you don't get happy office staff if you're not successful (who can be happy about a failing practice?) and personable (who wants to work for a crabass?). The review I found on Yelp helped me feel good about going to see him (so good that I added my own review).

I got local anesthesia for the debridement (he pulled out the dead flesh in my tooth socket -- did I mention that yet?) and they say you're supposed to wait after the shot for it to fully take effect. Which he did -- asking me if I felt my lips, did it feel weird? No, ok, you're not ready yet. But I got anxious waiting to get numb, then wasn't sure if I was numb enough. And while he's (literally) ripping stuff out of that hole, I can hear it in my head, and feel a little bit of the tugging in my mouth, but it doesn't hurt. There's no pain, but I've worked myself up so much that if I hear too much or feel too much tugging -- I tell myself I feel pain so I can make the doctor stop. Of course, I don't realize this at the time, but afterwards when I re-evaluated my repsonse (my body was tense; i was covered in sweat -- so much sweat that when they finished, they mopped my brow!), I realized there was no pain. And there wasn't any pain after the procedure either. I took some pain killers just before I left the office and didn't feel a thing after that, and didn't need any additional pain medication at all.

Today, when I was back there again, he pulled out a sharp, pointy tool and I didn't even flinch. He just stuck it right in my mouth, but I completely trust him now. And he totally deserves it -- I didn't even feel the pointy bit in my mouth!

Frank is so funny. We were at Valley Fair Mall a couple of weeks ago -- I can't remember what errand we had to run there. Anyway, there's this giant plastic kitty somewhere in the mall and we walked by it twice. Frank loves cats now and he cooed over it as we went by. On our way back, there was this tiny little chic with huge ass boobs walking by the kitty. I was watching her boobs, and after we passed the kitty, Frank says, whew...I didn't know where to look -- the kitty or the girl!. Well, I was looking at the girl. Yeah, but the girl you can see anywhere...but the kitty...!

He is a far better pet parent than I am. He dotes over the cats. He dotes over Einstein (who's proving to not be able to live up to his name -- he walked into a cactus the other day!) He spends all day with them. It's so cute. He wouldn't have let that turtle die, no matter how I kid -- while I was haplessly throwing stuff into the turtle cage, he did the research to find out the tank was the perfect size for her (I thought it was too small). I hopped on his computer days later and he had turtle websites up on his desktop :)

We're down to 8 pets: 2 dogs, 4 cats, 2 rats. I contacted a local, nonprofit reptile and amphibian organization (baars) and discovered it was ok to release the animals I'd found: the two Pacific Tree Frogs, and the Coastal Rubber Snake (the snake the cats were playing with). We wanted to keep the frogs as pets, but they weren't eating and I didn't want to watch them die. The turtle moved on to a another new home.