Thursday, January 9, 2014

Stop, Rinse and Spit


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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