Palpable Relief

I had a dental appointment yesterday to get some (minor?) work done... (a small side of tooth filling that had fallen out and something preventative I didn't understand).  Two teeth on the same side.

I, like many, am not a fan of dental work.  This isn't a life long thing, but an adult hood thing and it's to do with the pain and discomfort (well, duh!) especially of the freezing and all the after "pain" and just yeah... I don't like it.  

I sort of wish I could avoid it and I made jokes about avoiding it yesterday but as much as I'd like to just bail, I know that the work needs to be done to avoid worse in the future and it's like ok so if you "forget" to go today you'll just have to reschedule anyway so just get it done.

But I've been anxious about it, worried about it since the appointment was booked.  I thought I was doing a decent job at keeping the anxiety low and I took some meds to help extra with that yesterday and while there was a pretty uncomfortable moment during the freezing where it was feeling sort of hard to breathe for some reason?  Angle of my neck maybe?  (I started to have a panic attack, but I think the dentist noticed and long story short I made it through... thankfully.)

The procedure itself seemed short and the dentist and his helper chatted away with me the whole time and that helped and it wasn't until I was done and out (and kind of out of it, honestly, maybe the freezing made me a little zoned???) that I realized HOW HAPPY I was... and how nervous and anxious I must have been around it because the relief at being done (and it not having been awful) was amazing.  I was in SUCH a good mood... I had no idea I'd been that worried, really.

Now the freezing took about five hours to dissipate so eating dinner was weird, and man it's funny when they got me to "swish this water around in your mouth" and I was like... uh... I do not have feeling in an entire half of my mouth I can not "swish!"

But yeah, sometimes you don't know how glad you are to be done something until your entire system screams it at you.... like "LIFE IS GOOD WE ARE DONE THE DENTIST WOOO!"

Anyway... here's to more happy with less stress needed to get there, right?