Dry Socket

Here's the news bruise.
I got my wisdom teeth out on Monday.
Bad idea, don't EVER get your wisdom teeth out. I was very excited, only for the laughing gas, but the weeks worth of pain is not worth the 30 minutes of total relaxation. Because you will not relax anymore after that. My oral surgeon's assistant decided to tell me 5 minutes before she gassed me that I won't be able to smoke otherwise I get this nasty thing called dry socket. Now I'm a smoker, otherwise I wouldn't have asked. I smoked a 3 cigarettes the day after my surgery and swished water around in the hole, ate a hamburger, and used the irrigation tool they give me. This is highly unadvisable. You're not supposed to do this. But I love food and I love cigarettes! How was I supposed to not eat and not smoke? Now I'm sitting here wondering if this pain in my mouth is normal, or dry socket. And I'm running out of motrin.

Here's the story. I'm not a hypochondriac, except when it comes to melanoma and now dry socket. I know it doesn't make sense to only be afraid of melanoma and not lung cancer, but it's true. Lung cancer doesn't scare me. And having to get my teeth pulled later in life doesn't either. But dry socket scares the crap out of me. Every day, every time I think about it, I have to look it up, find out what the symptoms are, listen to people talk about it, find ut how to avoid it... and it scares me so much more. So why do I subject myself to this? I'm trying to comfort myself, but really all I'm doing is scaring myself even more and annoying everyone around me.

But I can't help but think that everything is going wrong. There's a bad taste in the right socket, it's not closing up as fast, it takes longer to respond to the pain meds.... I wish I can just relax about this. My dentist was a jerk when I called him at 9am this morning and asked him about all this, so that didn't really help either.

I hate being so high strung!