#squeamishness

This is NOT asking about things that other people don't usually mind but you find disgusting, nor about things that you have a personal sensory aversion to.

I can take pictures of my (still) screwed-up hand and look at the pictures and be fine. But looking directly at the real thing still grosses me out lots. Maybe it's just a matter of pixel count or something (real life being the ultimate in HD) but it's still weird.

I get the stitches out on Friday, and I'm planning on filming the process. :P

[Warning: this post mentions/describes Things That Are Gross, of a medical/biological nature. Think blood, needles, and parasites. If you can't handle reading about that sort of thing you should stop now.]

OK, so...since having to undergo periodontal surgery (functional crown lengthening) last month, I've found myself weirdly compelled to look up random medical/dental procedure videos and images. Mainly I think it's a "control thing", as in, somehow being able to expose *myself* to depictions of scary situations on my own terms makes it easier to deal with scary situations when I have no choice but to be in them.

I have consequently now seen a whole slew of things I didn't even realize humans could go through and survive. It's pretty amazing how robust bodies are (despite also being very fragile in some respects) and how good we've gotten at repairing really serious injuries, etc. 

  Anyhow, though, it's been interesting noting my own "squick response variance" throughout looking at all this stuff over the past few weeks.

  E.g., it seems that I'm actually a lot *less* squeamish than many people when it comes to things like, say, botfly larva removal. I watched a video of botflies being pulled out of an eyeball or something horrible like that the other night...while I was eating potato chips. o_0 I mean of course I thought it was GROSS, but still, it didn't prompt a perceptible physical reaction. Emotionally, my main response was relief on behalf of the person being de-larva-ed...I mean good grief, talk about "better out than in!"

  That said, it also seems that I'm a bit more squeamish about needles and blood than I thought I was. This is especially true in the case of anything with spurty blood or doctors "digging around" in a wound, possibly because I have such a bad personal history with blood draws. (I have really hard-to-find veins, which leads to a lot of the dreaded "digging", which leads to painful bruising/looking like a heroin addict afterward.) Lumbar puncture is also freaky to watch, even though I've never had one of those...there's just something extremely unnerving about the crystal-clear appearance of spinal fluid (UGH, it's making me flinch just typing that). I'm glad all this medical stuff exists and that it saves people's lives, etc., and I think it's kind of cool when people give permission for doctors to put their procedures up in video form so others can see what the procedures are like. But good grief, some of it is just difficult to sit through even when it's not anyone I actually know experiencing it.

  The thing that makes it (medical stuff) less awful to see than it would otherwise be, I think, is knowing (a) the procedure is being done for the sake of repairing something, and (b) knowing the person survived and got better.

  Meanwhile, I absolutely cannot and will not watch some of the stuff they apparently post on "shock sites", e.g., videos of people being tortured or even killed in war zones. I know it's important to acknowledge that that sort of thing happens, but even if I could watch it without crying or getting literally nauseous, I don't think it would be *good* to deliberately do so. I don't understand that mindset where people set out to watch as many brutally awful things as possible in order to "desensitize" themselves to it, as if somehow being sensitive to things like (for instance) watching people being decapitated with chainsaws is a bad thing.

  We SHOULD be sensitive to stuff like that! And it seems....disrespectful, somehow, to "use" the deaths of people who died so horribly for the sake of impressing your friends with what a bad-ass you are. It's hard to articulate why that's wrong but I have severe ethical problems with it. Every person in every image or video is a person. Every body part in every image or video used to belong to a person. Failing to acknowledge that seems...screwed up, somehow.

As I mentioned earlier, I am now free of mouth stitches from the crown lengthening procedure. Yay! But I'm only about halfway done getting the situation properly dealt with. My tooth is still broken, and now I have to wait until the end of March to go in and get it "prepared" for the crown it will later receive. 

They will at least be putting on a temporary crown during that appointment. Which is good because "preparing" the tooth basically means "grinding away a significant amount of the remaining tooth structure in order to create a little round nub-like thing that the crown will encapsulate". Which sounds...un-fun, but I am not nearly as apprehensive about it as the crown lengthening. At least it doesn't involve any cutting of gums. 

So now I just need to avoid cracking the tooth any further over the next month, because if the split goes any further up past the gumline, they won't be able to perform the restoration and will instead need to go in and yank the thing. Ugh.

As for the state of the mouth today, it's still sensitive to heat and cold and stuff in the stitched area, but overall it's calmed down a ton since the stitches were pulled. Flossing still feels odd, but not as scary as the first day. 

My "squick threshold" seems to be approaching baseline again too, though I wouldn't say it is all the way there. On that note, though, it's worth noting that I seem to be getting more squeamish about certain things in general the older I get. I've become less squeamish about stuff like serving raw meat to my cats (I can chop a gizzard without feeling like I'm about to dry-heave), but certain medical procedures and injuries (whether mine or others') seem to wig me out quite a bit more these days than they did when I was younger.

Apparently when one has had stitches recently removed from one's gums, one ought to let the coffee cool off before getting it all up in one's mouth business. Ye gads, that was un-fun.

That aside, the area still looks good (even better than yesterday), but brushing and flossing the 3 teeth that had stitches in between them feels and looks WEIRD. Matt was standing there boggling at me while I was in the bathroom trying to pull my lip up so I could actually see what I was doing.

I'm still feeling less squickable overall now that the stitches are gone, but my baseline is still skewed because I could literally see the color draining out of my face while getting the toothbrush close to that section of gum tissue (for the first time since the procedure) last night. It's not that it's painful (well, except when I get hot coffee in it!), it's just all wrong-feeling. I have...lines...in my gums...where the strings used to be going through them, and floss just kind of slips up in there in a manner that makes my insides all squirmy.