I am in the private oral surgery just a few blocks away from my house, watching the large blue and yellow fish swim in the large tank in the wall, around in circles.

A nurse in that aqua-marine uniform calls my name and shows me into the operating room. She makes small talk, about the weather, about it still being summer this late in September, about no rain, and I joke that I’ll be too out of it today to enjoy it, and she laughs in a way that tells me she completely agrees.

The surgeon comes in, Dr. Reichman, who looks more like a school guidance counselor or a kindergarten teacher than someone capable of ripping my mouth apart, not to mention, from what I can gather from the brochures in the waiting room, liposuction and chin augmentation.

After the hellos, everyone gets to work. A pad around my arm to monitor my blood pressure and pluse. An IV into my arm, starting with saline (a little bit of breakfast, he calls it), an oxygen tube around my nose so it will be easier to breath. And then the sedative.

“How fast does this work?”

-You’ll start to feel a little strange after about 30 seconds or so.

After about 10, my heads starts to feel like it’s falling inside of itself, drifting backwards away from the room, and I’m about to agree that I am, indeed, feeling a little strange, but there’s no time for that.

-James, wake up, the doctor says.

-Wake up, the nurse repeats.

It feels like I’ve been asleep for just a few seconds, but also for hours, a deep sleep without any dreams, so how could I tell, anyways. My eyes flutter open, and everything feels very blurry and slow, and while I can’t feel my mouth at the same time it feels like it’s the size of my entire head.

“Is it over? Already?”

The nurse takes my arm into a small room with a bed, lies me down, and straps ice packs against my cheeks.

“I’m so tired, I could go back to sleep,” I mumble out of a mouth full of gauze through lips that won’t move.

“What time is it?”

- 10:30-

“How did it go?”

-Everything went great.

“What about the nerve?” I say, even in this state worried about the one complication I was told about months ago.

- It’s just fine.

“What time is it?”

-10:35

There are detailed instructions, which I mostly forget, and a booklet and two out of four teeth in a paper cup and gauze and prescriptions, and then the nurse and Christa walk me out through a side door (I’m guessing to avoid scaring the other waiting patients with my battered face) and out to the car, and after a short drive to the pharmacy, which I also mostly forget, it’s into the apartment and onto the futon and almost immediately back to sleep.

A day later, and things are mostly fine, thanks to the codeine and ice packs and a diet that’s been mostly jell-o and pudding and juice and pureed soup. A little puffy, a little bruised, but I’m mostly no worse for wear, but four teeth lighter, and perhaps a little less wise.