in june i decided to sign up for something i have wanted to be apart of for a very long time... i signed the dotted line to go to rwanda for an 11-day mission trip in november. don't even get me started about the details and what all we'll be doing and seeing and experiencing. anytime i talk about it for more than a couple minutes it becomes increasingly harder to resist driving to the airport and leaving right this very second, so let's just leave it as i signed up, which gave me five months (uh oh, hello, five months! five months... not much) to raise some funds and all of a sudden i had penny pinching on the brain.
so naturally when i heard a radio commercial asking for paid volunteers to get their wisdom teeth out in exchange for a willingness to have experimental drugs tested on them following the procedure, i could not think of one reason not to call and make an appointment to go in and see if i was a match and possibly earn some extra cash for my trip.
very long and painful story short: i was a match. had the surgery at 7am on a friday morning. it took an hour. was supposed to take 20 minutes. the doctor had shortness of breath and beads of sweat dripping down the sides of his face while trying to push my two left-sided wisdom teeth out. an actual hammer was used on my stubborn upper tooth too many times to count. (this is when my crying started and the nurse caressed my legs, whispering it would be over soon.) got out of surgery and was given the placebo. cried some more. had to wait two hours to receive any sort of pain relief. got a vicodin at long last. went to my recliner and slept pain-free, but had to be there 4 more hours so they could measure my pain once an hour, every hour.
4:15pm finally came and my mom and sister's smiles and waves from the waiting room quickly turned into panic as they saw me, expressionless, limping towards them like a wounded soldier returning from the trenches. THANK YOU LORD FOR MY MOM AND SISTER. they rescued me and took me to the couch and nursed me back to a semblance of health in my darkest hour.
this is me two days after the surgery:
someone told me it didn't look like there was anything wrong with my face in this picture and i would like to slap that person. do they always think i resemble a chubby bunny?! maybe it's hard to tell, but i could not move any part of my lower face at this point. even though i only had the 2 lefties extracted, my right side was swollen as well from being pushed open so wide. i mean, i guess i'm not going to beg for pity here, but i feel like it should be given regardless.
it has now been four weeks and the pain has finally subsided and my swelling is no longer an issue. still hurts when i chew gum. and i just started flossing "back there" again. clearly the battle scars are still fresh. but you better believe i got that $225 check and deposited it directly into my africa fund like nobody's business. (ps i originally thought it was double that amount but didn't read the fine print. shoot.)
bet you thought that was the extent of my fund-raising projects, huh? nope.
the second brilliant idea came to me as i was budgeting on mint.com and realized i spend an embarrassingly large amount on my head of hair. embarrassing. i'm not sure when i decided i was really rich and it didn't matter how much i paid to get my hair trimmed and colored multiple times a year, but i saw the numbers for myself and wanted to throw up a little bit. so clearly this means i need to start coloring it myself! (and by that i mean my sister needs to start coloring it for me.) you do know there are aisles and aisles of $10 boxes of hair color in every grocery store, drugstore, big box store you frequent, right? genius.
of course, before all is said and done, yaya gets in on it, does the homework and finds out all the tricks of the trade, has all the girls over, makes a scrumptious dinner, and ends up pulling my ratty hair through a color cap for a couple hours on a thursday night. here is me towards the end of the "drying process" when i realize my hair is 10 shades lighter than i thought it would be:
it ended up totally working and i was really happy with it. big thanks to yaya for making it happen... as well as to my mother, sister, both abbys, maddie and blake for the moral support. i needed it. jury's out as to what we're going to do when the fall months are upon us and beach blonde barbie needs a root touch-up... but let's just burn that bridge when we get there.
cheers to me for stepping out and trying new things! except for i will never cheers myself for getting those #$%& wisdom teeth out execution-style. mistake. but you live you learn.
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