The Blender

For the past week, my mouth has been the center of my attention.

Not the words coming out of it, because I’ve been trying to avoid talking, but the physical things going on inside.

I had a gum graft for a receding gum line. I don’t know why it’s receding. I take excellent care of my teeth. Dental hygienists love me because I make their jobs so easy. However, I grind my teeth and clench my jaw every single night. Yes, I have a night guard, but I think that just keeps my teeth from breaking.

Skin was cut from the roof of my mouth and stitched onto my gums of my bottom front teeth.

The periodontist, who I think was super thorough, said that my mouth would feel like it had a bad burn where the skin had been removed.

False.

The pain in my mouth a couple hours after the surgery was incredible. Yes, I iced it. I took 800 mg of Motrin before I left the office and a Tylenol-3 the second I got in my car after filling the prescription. It took forever for the pain to recede.

My mouth was a misery for the whole day. My chin was swollen—I didn’t realize how much until a day or two later—it looked a pop-culture witch chin. A bruised one.

I didn’t want to talk. I didn’t want to smile. I didn’t want to interact. All I wanted to do was distract myself from the pain.

I don’t remember it being this bad the first two times I had it done, which would have been around 2004, but that was a while ago. Or maybe I received better drugs then, I don’t know.

Point is, I’ve been really focused on my mouth, despite my efforts to divert my attention. The pain lessened but the swelling and soreness persisted for days.

Throughout this, thoughts of my sister, Lisa, kept sneaking in. I’d push them away, then a memory would surface and I’d sink it and there it would come again, a persistent buoy in the current of my mind.

My family and a friend brought me smoothies, but if I’d been thinking clearly, I could have simply made one.

At the thought of liquefying food for my sore mouth, the memory of a blender in the kitchen of my childhood home growled in my head. A picture joined the sound: my sister at the kitchen table, wearing loose sweats, while my mom fixed her “dinner.” I remember it as turkey and gravy, but that could be way off. Memory is a tricky thing.

Whatever it was, it wasn’t a fun smoothie. It was dinner turned to mush then squished into a large, needle-less syringe, and, still warm, my sister would place it between the space where her teeth had been, between the wires holding her jaw together, and depress the plunger, a little at a time, ever-so-carefully.

She was recovering from being struck by a vehicle; the side-view mirror had hit her face and basically broke all the bones there, including her hard palate, which was split. Teeth gone. Jaw broken. Nose askew. Eye-socket cracked. Horrific concussion. The worst kind you can have without your brains leaking out.

After she survived those first few nights, her doctors keeping an eye on her swelling brain, my mom sleeping in the room with her, after she survived, the healing had to begin.

I hope her pain meds were better than mine.

But, still, it had to hurt.

My family’s focus centered on Lisa’s mouth for months, that, and the things you could put in a blender or food processor and still have it be edible. Steak? Chicken? Meatloaf? French toast?

I think she ate a lot of mashed potatoes.

My mouth pain, of course, was nowhere near there this past week. Not even on the same continent, the same part of the world, the same planet. My surgery was mild, elective, I suppose, since I am electing not to lose my teeth. Lisa, on the other hand, was being put back together again.

In the end, after years of surgeries, teeth implants, and repairs, her doctors did an amazing job. She. Was. Beautiful.

She carried scars, though: some visible, some not; some physical, some mental.

She carried them and they must have been so heavy.

Lisa