Home now. Got in the door about 15 minutes ago.

The procedure went smooth and the surgeon was really great. My pre-surgery check-in was around noon, surgery at 2pm and I was back at my Aunt’s place by 4:30ish.

I’ve been following the directions, icing and taking all the pills I’ve been prescribed and so far recovery has been much, much better than anticipated. No typical “day after” throat or nose irritation from the anasthetic, no visible bruising, almost no swelling. I slept without more pain killers needed through the night and dabbing my gums this morning showed that I have little bleeding going on. That doesn’t mean I’m gonna go grab a steak tonight, but a speedy recovery is looking quite likely.

This afternoon I’m going to relax and eat some pudding. No point in pushing things and screwing it all up.

I’ve currently got my goatee in full effect since I didn’t want to aggravate the skin on my chin and cheeks. It feels a little weird when I look in the mirror and see that old look I had from college staring back, only now without glasses or contact lenses.

Gal told me Tuesday before I left that I’d probably be a “poster boy of recovery”. Here’s hoping that’s accurate. So far so good.

Behind the LJ cut you get to see my extracted teeth if you’d like. Not for the squeamish 🙂

Check these chompers out…

Tooth update:

Dental surgery is tomorrow early afternoon. All four teeth to be extracted. I’ll be totally knocked out for the full procedure. I’ve been desperately trying to get as much work front loaded this week so people will know what needs to be done while I’m out of commission and recovering. It’s sort of working, but I know things will still go insane anyways.

Everyone I’ve talked to about the tooth stuff has wildly different stories. They’re all either people who recovered in a day and were eating fried chicken within two days or were in absolute agony for 5+ days. There’s no happy medium.

I’m a terrible patient, just awful. When I get sick I’m surly and needy, clingy and emotional. I’m a huge suck. I hate being “taken out” of the Game of Life and being laid up in bed feels like that to me. There’s too much to be done and my groggy antibiotic and painkiller inundated body doesn’t feel up to the task.

Wish me luck.

The third of my new “One Step” comic portfolio building articles is up here.

Here’s links to the three so far:
One Step 1: Launch
One Step 2: Critical Eyes
One Step 3: Sketching It Up

I like doing the column, though juggling it with everything else has been a challenge.

Well, it may not be more scratches to my car, but today’s news is equally obnoxious and going to cost me more money just the same.

Seems the my dental benefits at the college, since I now have dental with my expanded hours, don’t kick in until April 1st because of a waiting period they have attached to them. So the x-rays, yesterdays emergency evaluation and dental surgery will come right out of my pocket.

Fantastic.

Apparently I shouldn’t have even gotten up this week.

I had another dental appointment at 7:45am to get a special panoramic x-ray of my teeth to isolate the problems.

They gave me a copy to give to the specialist, which they’ll hopefully be able to get me in to see later today:

Impacted lower wisdom teeth. Upper wisdom teeth tearing into my gums as well. The white around the teeth represents the protective ‘good stuff’. Notice that both bottom circles show areas where the darker stuff goes right to the edge of the teeth – cavity goodness therein. The front teeth are all fine even if my scan makes them look dark, it’s just those wisdom and molar buggers causing me grief.

Looks like all four wisdoms gotta go and one of my molars will need either a cap or a root canal. That’s the effect of artist-quality lifestyle and ignorance right there, folks.

In the long run it’ll probably fix the odd bad breath bout and other teeth aches too.

More info when I know more. My work schedule will be hosed and pain killers will be my friend, but it’s gotta get done. Off to the college to do admin work and get as much lecturing done as I can before this dental roller coaster kicks into gear.

Thanks to everyone who posted or e-mailed well wishes after yesterday’s craziness.

I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried.

Leaving the college early in blinding jaw pain (see previous post), I stumbled to the car parking complex trying to think of what I could eat to tame the stomach beast that was going nuts. Walking towards my car, right before my eyes, a car pulls into the empty space beside mine at an angle that just looked ‘wrong’ and promptly scrapes the right-hand rear side of my car with a crunch and drag that echoes along the cement floors and walls. Right before my eyes! Today of all days!

I wasn’t even angry. The pain was so intense in my face that I just shook my head. The young girl driving looked at it aghast, looked at me to confirm that it was indeed my vehicle and then started shaking and quivering her lip ready to cry.

“My boyfriend’s gonna kill me. It’s his car.”

Looking closer, I was surprised that even with such an awful sound my car looked unharmed physically beyond scraped paint. We exchanged info and I told her I’d get a quote on the paint job. We’ll keep insurance companies out of this and just deal with it directly. Driving home, every heartbeat sent a ripple of pain through my gums. Mouth open, mouth closed, there’s no good position or relief.

Home now, choked down some soup and have an appointment at the dental office nearby for 6:30pm. Coverage or no, I need to at least find out what’s possible and get a prescription for some juicy pain killers until a surgery date or something. I’m having trouble reading e-mails or thinking straight as it throbs.

Wish me luck. Today’s apparently not my day.

Every year this happens, then it goes away eventually and I forget the pain. It started really badly again yesterday.

I’ve never gotten my wisdom teeth out and they’re throbbing again. Some years when I was freelancing I had the nerve to get them out but didn’t have a dental plan. Other years I had the coverage but didn’t have the nuts to get them taken out, opting for pain killers instead and waiting for it to subside.

One of the lower teeth is actually lying sideways with its roots heading up into my jaw. That one will hurt the most out of the four (it also hurts the most now) and has a slight chance of damaging the nerves in my jaw when it’s taken out. That scares me the most and has kept me from carrying through on the whole deal.

My new coverage is coming through at the college. Maybe I’ll step up to the plate and get it done this time. The idea of being knocked unconcious for the procedure seems quite appealing right now.

Even on Advil and Tylenol I could barely sleep last night and the numbing, pounding ache when I woke up this morning was excruciating. I’m sitting at my desk at the college answering e-mails with a dizzy haze of agony in my face. I look in the mirror and there seems to be minimal swelling I can see, but my face feels grotesque and bloated nonetheless. The bags under my eyes definitely don’t help the whole thing.

Seneca side of my day so far: Responding to application inqueries, refining portfolio requirements, summarizing curriculum material, building hand-outs for the students, rereading over theories I’ll be covering next week in class and assembling a budget “wish list” for September.

Udon side of my day so far: Following up on unpaid invoices, calling clients so we can schedule future projects, getting in touch with artists to schedule their time, getting printer templates for new products and planning convention material. Wondering what kind of curveballs the comic and RPG industry will throw me next.

Tonight, ideally, I turn my brain OFF. Heh.

I’ve been told Exalted #3 will be in stores February 8th. The proof looks spiffy. If you’ve liked the issues so far, this will not disappoint. It has 4 pages of Exalted interviews with the White Wolf staff and exclusive previews of the 2nd ed core book as well.

I’m also happy to report that the Exalted comic is now available in PDF format from Drive Thru RPG:
Exalted #0 Convention Exclusive
Exalted #1
Exalted #2

The Exalted 2nd edition RPG content from both the regular and powerfoil versions are included in each PDF. Download away, enjoy and then tell a friend.

Adding a bit to my previous post, the Filefront version of the Ahn’ Qiraj file’s been downloaded more than 34,000 times at this point and the Warcraft Movies mirror version has been downloaded over 7000 times. That’s pretty insane stuff for a 56 meg video game movie file and doesn’t even include the guilds who are apparently passing it around or hosting it on their sites. Madness.

Loosely tying into that, Monday’s just a good day for Jimbo exposure on the net because the second column in my new series at Newsarama also went up and the response has been very good overall. Thankfully the column is bi-weekly. With everything else going on I don’t think I could heap that on my plate weekly.

Tomorrow I start my 3 day teaching stint, getting into a better groove with my classes and riding out the rest of January hopefully a bit better than I entered into it.