2008-02-19 - 10:02 p.m.

On Thursday morning, I'm going to have all four wisdom teeth removed. I'm totally suspicious that the whole wisdom tooth removal gig is a racket. Although mine are impacted and completely horizontal, they've never bothered me, but the oral surgeon assures me that, oh yes, they will eventually cause major problems, and wouldn't I rather have them out right now while I'm a student and have plenty of time to recover, as opposed to having to miss work at some later date? I'm too chicken to gamble on something like this, so off I go to surgery. What makes this surgery especially unappealing is the fact that by the time you're in your 30s, recovery is much more difficult than it would've been had you elected to have the teeth removed in your early 20s.

My oral surgeon drives a Maserati. Given my suspicions, I filed this factoid as evidence that the tooth removal is a racket. But when I mentioned the factoid to a law school acquaintance, the acquaintance said, "Well, you know dentists have the highest suicide rate of all professions." I didn't know what to say to that. Was she offering this statistic to say, "You know, even though they're racketeers, they're miserable, so just give them a break and let them drive their nice cars before they kill themselves." Or maybe she was on my side? Maybe she was suggesting they kill themselves because they can't live with having put people through horrible, unnecessary surgery? Law school people are pretty weird.

Anyway, I'm terrified about this, mainly because of the whole early 30s thing.

 

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