The Wisdom Teeth Went Great

It was the smoke alarm, dead bird, missing phone and one extremely large slushie that made everything more complicated.

This dispatch was supposed to be about how we’ve all become so accustomed to hassle, delay and low-grade institutional incompetence that when something actually works the way it’s supposed to, we assume there’s been some kind of clerical error.

Specifically: getting my teenager’s wisdom teeth removed.

From the initial dental exam to the referral to the scheduling to the insurance to the final bill, the entire process had been so shockingly easy that in the days leading up to the procedure, I kept waiting for someone to call and say, “Actually, we have no record of your daughter existing.”

But they didn’t.

It was fabulously effortless. 

Frankly, I was suspicious.

I should have been…

The morning began, as so many military-family stories do, with my husband leaving town.

He was up and out by 3 a.m., which is relevant only because every military spouse understands a fundamental law of nature:

The moment your spouse leaves town, Murphy moves in.

The water heater breaks. A child develops a rash not yet documented by modern medicine. 

We’ve all been there.

So there I was, happily asleep, dreaming no doubt of the glorious day (tomorrow!) when school resumes and I can once again locate a routine, when the house erupted in the shriek of our hard-wired smoke alarms.

I shot out of bed like a catapulted water balloon.

We’ve only lived in the house a month, so I have not yet developed my mental smoke-detector map. I sprinted downstairs, then back upstairs, dashing room to room looking for smoke, flames or anything else that might explain why the house sounded like a submarine under torpedo attack.

Nothing.

Eventually I found the offending detector.

In my bedroom.

The room I had launched myself out of at approximately Mach 3.

There it was, blinking smugly.

Apparently, I had evacuated the room so efficiently that I failed to notice the problem was six feet from where I had started.

I retrieved a step stool from the garage, wrestled the detector off the ceiling and deposited it next to the trash cans. If it intended to resume screaming, it could do so among its peers.

Then I returned to bed and tried to go back to sleep.

Biologically, however, my bloodstream was now approximately 40 percent adrenaline.

So instead I lay there staring at the ceiling, drifting in and out of strange half-dreams and thinking the profound thoughts one thinks after being awakened in terror, such as:

Did I close the garage door?

Eventually I got up and began the day, already aware that I would be operating with slightly reduced cognitive capacity.

Which would soon make me the most mentally alert person in the car.

The story now fast-forwards through the actual wisdom-teeth-removal procedure because, incredibly, this is the boring part.

We arrived.

They took my daughter back.

They removed four teeth.

Nothing went wrong.

No one suddenly discovered our insurance company considered teeth an elective luxury.

While my daughter slowly regained consciousness, the nurse suggested I go downstairs and bring the car around so they could wheel her out and help her into the passenger seat.

She was awake, but only in the technical sense—eyes open, answering questions, looking around the recovery room with the vague wonder of someone seeing colors for the first time.

I left her with the nurse and headed for the parking lot.

And this is where the morning changed genres.

As I rounded the sidewalk and caught my first glimpse of the front of my car, I noticed something sticking out of the grille.

It was a bird.

A substantial bird.

Wedged deep into the plastic honeycomb of my front grille.

One wing extended straight out the front like a feathery traffic cop warning all other birds to detour.

One thought rose above the rest: I cannot drive home like this.

So I pinched the exposed wing and gave it a tentative tug.

I was not fully prepared for what would happen next, mainly because I had never before attempted to extract a bird from a Toyota.

About 85 percent of the bird came free.

Suddenly I was standing in a medical-office parking lot holding a dead bird by one wing like the world’s worst carnival prize.

I did a quick scan for witnesses and tossed it into the bushes.

Which solved one problem while revealing another.

Because a collection of feathers and what can only be described as bird interior remained tangled in the grille.

There was absolutely no way I was pulling this car into my garage with avian intestines waving from the bumper like party streamers.

A few minutes later, the nurse wheeled my daughter downstairs and we bundled her into the passenger seat. She looked remarkably calm, giving the casual observer the false impression that her brain was actually operational.

As we pulled onto the highway, I explained that we would be making a brief detour to a car wash because, somewhere between leaving our house and arriving at the oral surgeon, I had apparently struck a bird without noticing.

She blinked slowly.

“Okay.”

Pause.

“Can we go to Sonic too?”

I considered this.

Honestly, why not?

The morning had already involved a smoke alarm, oral surgery and an accidental bird dissection. A slushie felt almost medicinal. Maybe I’d get some tots. 

Miraculously, there was a Sonic directly beside a car wash a few miles away. Perfect.

We pulled into a Sonic stall, my driver’s-side window positioned neatly beside the ordering screen.

My daughter then spent several minutes trying to decide between a cherry and cranberry slush using what appeared to be her three working brain cells.

Eventually a decision was reached.

The enormous slushie arrived.

I handed it to her.

She accepted it.

I put the car in gear.

And then she said:

“I can’t find my phone.”

Of course you can’t.

We looked under the seat. Beside the seat. In the door. Under her. Nothing.

I called it.

Buzz.

Somewhere beneath her.

Friends, this phone had disappeared as though she had dropped it directly into the Mariana Trench.

I realized I was going to have to get out of the car and perform a full search, which might ultimately involve physically standing up my heavily sedated daughter and checking to see whether her iPhone had somehow fallen into her pants.

There was only one problem.

I had parked the car exactly as Sonic intended: close enough to the ordering screen that I could reach it comfortably from my window.

Which meant my driver’s door would now open approximately six inches before colliding with a smashburger menu.

So I sucked in 48 years of good living, turned sideways and squeezed myself through the six-inch opening like toothpaste from a tube.

I climbed into the back and began digging underneath her seat while she sat above me clutching a giant red slushie and contributing exactly what you would expect from someone recently released from anesthesia.

I now understand why airlines tell you to notify the cabin crew when you drop a phone between the seats.

Eventually I found it wedged in a seat-rail crevice apparently designed for the permanent cell phone storage.

Then I had to reverse the toothpaste maneuver, wedge myself back through the six-inch opening and reclaim the driver’s seat.

At last, we headed toward our true destination: the bird-gut-removal facility.

We pulled into the car wash lane, where a cheerful attendant asked what level of wash I wanted.

“One that can get bird guts off the front grille,” I said.

To his credit, he did not ask any follow-up questions.

He recommended the $22 platinum wash. Naturally.

There is something about car wash neon lights and colored soap that makes you feel as though you’ve driven your car directly into a 1990s nightclub.

What I had not considered was what this sensory experience might look like to a teenager currently under the lingering influence of oral-surgery anesthesia.

The pink lights came on.

Soap flooded the windshield.

Massive brushes began swirling around the car.

And beside me, my daughter slowly lifted her phone and began recording.

Her eyes widened.

Her face was strapped inside a neoprene sling holding two ice packs against her cheeks.

She stared through the windshield like Charlie Bucket in Willy Wonka’s psychedelic tunnel, if Charlie had owned an iPhone and just had four teeth removed.

I could practically hear her internal monologue:

The colors.

She filmed the whole thing.

We emerged into daylight with a sparkling car, no visible bird remains and my daughter sipping a slushie approximately the size of her torso.

I wondered how much of our little side quest she would remember.

Ends up, almost none of it.

Later that night, my husband called from out of town and asked the obvious question:

“How did the surgery go?”

I thought about the smoke detector.

The dead bird.

The parking-lot extraction.

The Sonic phone excavation.

The $22 intestinal-detail package.

The anesthesia-fueled neon documentary.

“The surgery?” I said.

“Oh, that part was easy.”

So I guess I was right to be suspicious.