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I got back to my flat today.

Have washed, dried and put away the laundry I brought back.

Had a nap.

Picked bit of suture off my tongue as the dissolving ones are now coming off as I was warned that they would over the week.  as they are coming off the gap between gum flap is opening up a bit revealing an uncomfortable amount of the membrane, making it unsettlingly clear how little is holding in the bone graft material.  The information I was given just says that the membrane is extracted from cows - which is vague is a way that is more creepy that the human corpse way of the bone graft material.

A bit of reading up on it and I think it is mostly bovine collagen.   So I am part human zombie and part cow.

The permission form I signed on the day (which I have since got a copy of) included plans to also use porcine derived material  to aid the graft, but they were out of stock.  So I miss out on also being part Miss Piggy.

Having a staring role in a body horror

Last Wednesday morning I went in to the dentist expecting a fairly straight forward extraction.

This was a wrong assumption.

I was presented with an informed consent form explaining about the grafting material of bone extracted from donor corpses - I was supposed to have left with a copy of the information, but didn't, thus I was expecting to have it written down.

The first root of the tooth popped out easily, the second took a very long time.  It kept fracturing, and was hooked into the bone more than expected.  It was slow and brutal.  Having to slice my gums away with a scalpel to get access.

And when it was done I stupid thought the worse was over.  I hadn't realised how much they would be going into my jaw.  I had a bunch of fully encapsulated cysts under the tooth inside my jaw.  Once I was shown the huge back shadow they had cast on my x-ray I was left wondering how my jaw hadn't broken considering how little jaw was left.

So I had a dent postgrad levering inside with various tools before pulling out freaky squishy things like alien or insect eggs from my jaw with, what I learned were called, pathology forceps (fat handled tweezers with very fine tips).

Then cleaning, and the slow packing in of the grafting material.  The membrane placement, and my sliced gums being stitched as flaps over the membrane to hold it in place.  As the undergrad dent student who had been observing was sent to get more suture thread multiple times, and the dentist started to lose patience that exhaustion was making it hard for me to keep my mouth fully open at the end of what turn out to be very nearly a three and a half hour process.

Sure I had been numbed up a lot, but my jaw hurt and I was getting pretty exhausted and was starting to feel pretty unwell.

It was not a fun time.

And I failed to get a bunch of the information I was supposed to get before I left.

I forgot to get the tooth they had extracted, so I guess it got binned.

I got back to catsitting and the cat was very happy as I mostly just dozed in the lazyboy, which is his favourite chair for sitting on people.  For days.

And the bleeding and then salty oozing in my mouth reduced my appetite enough I have lost another kilo.  Down to 116kg - which I realise seems like a giant number to normal sized people but it a lot less than it used to be.  I don't even know when I last weighed this 'little'.

Also, why does losing weight depress me even more than gaining?  The mental health minefield of internalised fatphobia...

Anyway, now I just need to not burn down Si's house for four more days.  More like three and half really.

The ginger menace is a slave driver

On the last day of July I came out to Simon and Joe's to start serving Catsie, the one-eyed ginger overlord, while his usual servant are off gallivanting.

So I have been on the Taieri enjoying the luxury of not being in my awful apartment building having to deal with my awful neighbours.  The luxury of having a whole house to wander about instead of living in a shoe box.  The luxury of a pellet burner so that I can look at the beauty of fire.  And the luxury of a bath tub so that I have now treated myself to a soak to relieve my knee of much of its annoyingness.

Of course it was once out here, and unable to get to town without bothering other people for transport, that I finally got contacted by the dental school about a waiting list I have been on since... I think 2017 (possibly even 2016) for something that was supposed to be done within 18 months but they have only just got to.

So I had an assessment last week and discovered that fortunately I do still appear to have enough bone remain even after all this time.  In less good news, the gold crown that broke last year but not leave enough healthy root to be repairable, so the amount of actual tooth in my mouth shall decline even further.

Also, I didn't pack my reflux meds because the side effects were annoying me.  The side effects have indeed cleared up, but after 14 days of not taking it the reflux is really starting to kick in again and is very bothersome.  Will have to work out the balance of how occasionally to take it to take the edge off the reflux without making myself sick in other ways.

I should be better at writing in this, but my mental health has not been great and it would just be a lot of moping onto the page - and no one needs that.

I haven’t been sleeping great out here, especially since the dentistry of it all started up.

My giant hulking bear of a dentist has been ringing me almost daily wrangling details as he complicates things by treating my diabetes like it means I am made of glass and will shatter under the drill.  And his worry is making my general discomfort with situations where I don’t have control into a swirling spiral of anxiety.

It has led to a lot of getting in my head a lot about my general diabetes management.  In the… I think two years now… since I did that last diabetes trial my HbA1c has not recovered, in spite of the fact that I have slowly lost almost 20kg and followed the dietician advice fairly well.  It is almost like my metabolism is fucked in general, what with lacking a major regulatory organ and having been a bit of a trainwreck even before that.

And Catsie is kind of a jerk, which doesn’t help.

He takes any sign that I am getting ready for bed as a sign to suddenly because very demanding of attention - after having shunned any interaction I had offered at time that were actually convenient for me.  And he gets very loud if I try to ignore him and just go to bed.  Tiny orange troll.

I should be forgiving, he is old.  Based on his declining appetite is quite possibly the last time I will be cat-sitting him.