Later On

When I was in graduate school in Iowa City, 24, I had four impacted wisdom teeth removed at a blow, figuratively speaking. (I was under general anæsthesia, but I feel certain it must have been four blows.) While I was in recovery, a person that in my (frequent) retelling I call “a woman in a white dress” but at the time I (naively) assumed was a nurse, passed by my bed and pointed to the icepack around my jaws. “You can take the icepack off,” she said, and walked on. I never saw her again, possibly she had been wearing a wig.

So I removed the icepack, and after a short pause—a beat, little more—the skin at the corner of my jaws was dry, red, hot and swelling visibly. I could feel it swell, and that is not an exaggeration: the rate was fast and the extent large.

“So,” I said later, buttonholing anyone who paused facing me at a party, “I then realized that it was no nurse. It was a crazy woman who would put on a white dress of an afternoon, and wander through the hospital, dispensing optimistic advice: “Are those tubes uncomfortable? You can just remove them.” “Is the machine noise bothering you? You can just turn it off.” “You can take those icepacks off now.”

So I told it through the years. And two days ago, The Elder Grandson, 15, had his four wisdom teeth removed at once. There were two nurses in Recovery, doing the old Brusque Nurse, Nice Nurse routine. TEG was struggling to get his shirt on over the icepack around his jaws, when Brusque Nurse uttered the fabled words: “You can take the icepack off.” TEG, who at 15 had heard the story dozens if not hundreds of times, literally froze, every sense alert. Slowly, carefully articulating, firmly, and prepared to fight, he said, “No. I don’t have to wear the shirt. I can just put on my coat.” He slowly reached for his coat, watching her closely in case she made a grab for the icepack. Brusque Nurse looked at him, shrugged, and walked away.

Nice Nurse came in and saw that TEG was still wearing his icepack. “You’ve still got your icepack. Good. They say ’20 minutes on, 20 minutes off,’ but I say keep it on as much as you can stand.”

Obviously, oral tradition and tribal warnings do indeed work. And obviously, too, Good and Evil contend everywhere, and an entire group of oral surgery nurses wants to get those icepacks off after 20 minutes, “just for a while, 20 minutes, then right back on,” ignoring the fact that in 20 minutes your jaws will have expanded to muskmelon proportions and that the icepack will be laughably too small and ridiculously after the fact—which, I suppose, is the idea: for that group, our sufferings are their amusement. Seems familiar, somehow. But only a very small percentage of people would be that way.