Editor’s Note:  Newspaper reporter Jayden Phipps had an editorial due the same week she had her wisdom teeth out.  After complications and missing the entire week, Jayden just typed something to get it done.  This is her product.  

The average person starts experiencing side effects from the growth of their third molars around the ages of 12-18. The vast majority of adolescents get the removal surgery before they turn 18. In my situation, one of my wisdom teeth had grown in prematurely and was causing obstructions and shifts to the teeth that were presently in my mouth.

Recently, I had to have my own widsom teeth surgery. I was hooked up to a laughing gas machine as well as a monitor for my heartbeat. I had an IV inserted to my arm by a needle and the oral surgeon told me that I was going to start to fall asleep.

I was hooked up to the machine for about two minutes before I started feeling effects. My vision went blurry and everything was moving in slow motion. The surgeon put a block to my mouth so when I fell unconscious my mouth would stay propped open.

The next moment I remember was waking up with tons of bloody gauze packed in my mouth and getting rolled to the car in a wheelchair. It took my a second to collect myself and make sense of the world around me. My first thought was being scared because I hasn’t remembered falling asleep before the surgery. All of my memories from the time I was hooked up to the anesthetics and the time I woke up were gone; I had blacked out.

The next part of the story should be taken from a second person perspective as I have no recollection of my actions due to being under the influence of sedatives. On the car ride home, I kept chewing and spitting out my gauze instead of letting the cloth clot the open wounds in my mouth. I was told that I was sobbing the whole ride home and had no idea why I was crying. When I arrived home, I thought I was able to walk on my own and fell once getting out of the truck and once walking up the stairs to my room.

I made tons of videos where the audio was inexplicable and tried to have a functional conversation on the phone with my friends until I was told to stop talking so my sutures would stop bleeding.

The surgeon told me I would experience minimal swelling and that I would be fit to return to school the next day. I was prescribed hydrocodone and was advised to rest and clean the wounds well. Three long days of aching pain and attempted recovery later, my face had reached its peaking point of how swollen it was and I wasn’t healing.

One of my cheeks was so swollen it looked like I had saving food inside like that of an animal. When I went back to the dentist for my post-op checkup, I knew something was wrong when the receptionist had asked me, “What’s wrong with your face?” The swelling had disabled my jaw from opening fully, I had a huge mass in my cheek and the sutures from one of the tooth sites had ripped. I had gotten an infection and that was the reason behind my delayed healing. The odds of wisdom tooth extraction complications in 30%, and most people have a smooth recovery. I had very high hopes for my experience from what I heard but I was painfully mistaken.

As a result, I missed a week of school, and am failing all my classes and am on three types of medication to fix the complications of a broken suture. I’m thrilled.

Editor’s Note:  Jayden is still thrilled as she catches up; but she doesn’t remember writing much of this editorial.  Don’t judge her too harshly.