surprises, not emergencies

So I ended up visiting my dentist on Monday. I was going about my work at my internship, when all of a sudden I noticed an odd feeling in the back of my mouth. It felt like there was a piece of string back by my tongue. Naturally, I assumed s suture had come loose, so I called my dentist to see what we should do about it. She was in surgery with another patient, but when she called me back later in the afternoon she said to come on in and let her take a look at it.

When I got to the check-in desk at the 2nd floor periodontal unit I told the receptionist that I didn't have an appointment but that my dentist had told me to come in and have them page her when I arrived. The response was "so it's an emergency appointment?"

Well, not really. To save time my answer was "I guess so." But really, it wasn't. There was no pain, no blood, just a piece of string that felt really weird. I guess they only have two labels for appointments in their system: planned or emergency.

It turns out that what I was feeling was not the all-important outer suture--purple thread in a continuous stitch that would have had to be tacked down instead of cut out--but a large piece of the inner, yellow suture, which should have dissolved after five days. This was 11 days after the surgery. So Fatema pulled out the offending piece of thread and flushed out the rest of the surgical site while she was at it. She says things are looking good, but the purple sutures still won't come out until next Friday.

So really, there was no emergency and not even a real problem. That suture was supposed to come out on its own, we just didn't expect to see such a large piece at once, or so late in the game. Surprise!

-Kim