On Monday I heard all kinds of instructions from the nurse
at the oral surgeons. All those
instructions came after the procedure and after being knocked out with
propofal. Funny, I came to singing
Thriller. So much of what she said
sounded like Charlie Brown’s teacher, wah, wah, wah, wah. I’m so glad Roy was there and heard all the
instructions with his orderly mind. I do
remember two instructions, don’t use a straw today and don’t spit. As someone who rarely spits except in the
case of brushing my teeth, all of the sudden I had this great desire to
spit. Guys spit all the time but girls
rarely do. I thought this instruction
was unnecessary. Remember boys and girls
back in the day when you had to rinse and spit in the little white porcelain bowl
next to you at the dentist office. I
hated having to spit cause then your strings of saliva would kind of hang onto
your chin and lips. So thankful for the
little vacuum thing they use these days.
This has not been my fastest recovery. My mouth hurts and it really hurts to
talk. Please, no comments about
that. Having both sides of my mouth
worked on feels odd and mainly it is the dental work in the front of my mouth
that hurts the most. I remember I came
to just a little while he was working on it and they quickly put me back
under. That’s good because I couldn’t
feel anything but I heard the sound. I
didn’t like it. Give me the sound of
silence.
The whole dental surgery thing was so unexpected. I knew I needed to schedule an appointment to
have a checkup because I had finally been cleared to get this done in October. But the past few months of the year felt
particularly busy and so my thoughts turned toward the New Year of taking care
of things, only to have a tooth fracture on Sunday afternoon. The tooth shattered as well as my plans to
leisurely get these things taken care of. The tooth never hurt, never had any
pain or any clue, it just went pop. Now
as I recover I am making all the appointments I need to be making for checkups,
physical and dental. I have been so
focused and rightly so with heart issues and heart events. I had to let other areas slide because at one
point my risk of stroke was highly elevated.
I’ve been blowing and going for all the right things but in the midst of
that entire heart journey, I forgot to stop at warning lights, red lights and
stop signs. It almost felt as if I had
carte blanch to disregard signs and unwisely thought I had a ‘siren’ and
authority to blow through everything else.
Uh, no, I don’t.
Last week while sitting at a stop sign, we all who had come
to the intersection together, were frightened by a driver who boldly blew
through the stop sign. It looked like
she knew what she was doing and confident in all of us having a slow start
through the intersection. She could beat
us. Roy and I were talking about this
later and he said something to the effect that so many times that is how we go
through our days, ignoring the stopping points or even just slowing down. We just blow through them expecting slowness
on the start and our remiss or errors finally catching up with us. Sometimes I find myself thinking; oh I’ve
done the heart problem thing, like it was mumps or chicken pox or measles. It doesn’t work that way, yet I am blowing
and going. Spiritual lessons or
applications…yea, I’ve been through that before, not going to come around
again. Uh…no, it doesn’t work that
way. Even thinking that once I get
through a certain time or a difficult reality, that I’ll have time then to
stop, rest and reflect. Lies, all
lies…because something else draws our attention.
This has been a welcomed day. The first in many days of totally having all
day to myself and I’ve stopped to listen in the silence from the One who knows
my name and days. Even in the beauty of
nature at Biltmore, the concerns of the day kept me from hearing and knowing
from the One, the Lord. Arriving home to
details and involvements kept me from the long visit of silence and prayer and
thinking and creating and dreaming. It
is good to have a day. I need more of
them.
I would also like to report, I didn’t feel the urge or the
compulsion to spit one time today.
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