So you go into the office and they'll ask you some questions. They'll sit you down and put a little mask over your face. First, it will give you air and then eventually it will give you "laughing gas". Before that, they stick you with a needle connected to an IV. But even before then, they need to know your heart rate so they put a pulse reader on your finger and some patches on your chest and side just to make sure.

Then they turn on the "laughing gas" and your lungs get tired from the deep breaths and you try not to shut your eyes because you don't want to be there or, like me, you want to see how long you can resist the gas before it knocks you out. It's pretty powerful stuff. You laugh once or twice before getting an hour of shut eye and then it's over before you know it. It feels like five minutes have passed but really it's ninety. You don't really know where you are at the end of it and you're not sure how early you've woken up since the surgery has been over. You have gauze in your mouth and you don't feel too bad.

When you get home, after an hour it starts to hurt. All your friends seemed to fight it off so easily but it really hurts. You remove the gauze and replace it for another hour. There is a lot of blood but you get used to it after a while. Then you take pills but they don't really work, not as much as you would like them to work. Now you know how a lion feels when it has some teeth removed. You feel weak because you have to swallow your food or cut it with just your lips. It's a really strange feeling. Not only that but you can hardly eat solid food for the first day or two and applesauce isn't really substantial so you feel hollow and like you're about to collapse. You don't.

In the morning, you may find blood on your pillow and on your face. You don't really care because it's just painful and you figured you could concentrate on your work because they gave you a small drug cache but it's not really enough. So you go to bed early and disappointed because the pain isn't agonizing but too much to actually do anything effective with your time. Then your friends show you all this nice food that you wish you could eat and a Shamrock shake sounds really good but you can't drink out of a straw without bleeding to death. So you dream of better days.

Some people heal better than others. My friends were A-okay when they had their wisdom teeth removed and others were dying for a month. One couldn't open his mouth completely for 4 or 5 weeks. Maybe you'll be lucky or maybe you'll be like me, out of commission for a week or so. On the bright side, it gets better. The pain isn't agony. The pain isn't everlasting and you might be able to laugh it off sooner than you thought. The moral of the story is: if you can't be lucky, the pain will pass soon enough.