Here’s a tip: When your orthedontist tells you to get your wisdom teeth out before they start coming through, do it. If you wait until they actually start hurting, you’ll regret it.

If you chew your food and your molars hurt, your jaw hurts a lot, you get a canker sore on the inside of your mouth, and you’re around the age of seventeen, I’m sorry to tell you this, but you might need your wisdom teeth taken out.

“It hurt more than I was expecting because my doctor said I would be able to go back to school after like three days,” said senior Mallory Colter. “So I wasn’t expecting to still be in pain after one week. The worst part was the surgery because I kept waking up during it.”

For me, I did not expect getting my wisdom teeth out to have been as painful as it was. I thought it would cause me pain of course, but not so drastically that I would have to miss a whole week of school and take three different medications to get me back to normal health: one for preventing infection, one for pain, and one for lowering the swelling of my face to keep me from looking like a chipmunk.

The only thing I was looking forward to was being put on laughing gas and having my brother record it. Sadly, I woke up and was really quiet, and I created absolutely no scene. That’s what I’m told at least, because the only thing I remember before getting home was getting the anesthesia shot. My whole body was tingling as if I had pins and needles stabbing me, and then I was laying in my bed with gauze in my mouth, unable to speak coherently.

Getting your wisdom teeth pulled was awful because, at least for me, it took a whole week to get better. This meant that I couldn’t  speak without having people responding, “what?” because of all the gauze in my mouth. It meant being too tired and dizzy to get out of bed for the first two days, having to ice my face for 20 minutes on and off, and lastly, the worst of all, not being able to eat solid foods for the whole week while I recovered.

A really fun upside to this situation though, was that ice cream and frozen yogurt were my best friends.

I’ll skip over the really disgusting parts like changing your gauzes, eating food while having your gums bleeding at the same time, and having the stitches get so soggy that they came undone.

I’ll be honest, I really did enjoy not having to wake up early for school. However, it feels good to be back because I’m not in pain. Plus, I feel really deprived of not going out and adventuring with my friends like I always do.

Learn from my mistakes. Ask about your wisdom teeth at your next dentist appointment before you start to feel your molars ripping through your gums. Nothing is worse than tooth pain. If you don’t ask, you’ll wish you actually did because there is no pain worse than your whole jaw hurting.