don't do what I did

 For literally years now, my dentist has been telling me to get my wisdom teeth out. I didn't want to do that. My thought process was "I'm going to keep my teeth for as long as possible" 

BIG mistake. My bottom left wisdom tooth broke off over the course of a few months and there was no pain at first so I figured the problem solved itself. 

I could not possibly have been more wrong. In February it got infected. I got medicine and it had stopped hurting, I had an appointment with the dental surgeon and I had him take out the other one that WAS hurting, on the right side. That one healed really quickly and essentially painlessly. I didn't need an ice pack and by day 3 I didn't even need pain medicine for it. 

Then the bottom left one got infected again, I took more medicine and had the appointment for March 16th to get it out. At that point I was actually looking forward to it because the two infections really were bad. 

Then I got it done...and it is the worst thing I've ever experienced. Because it was broken down to the gumline, he couldn't just grab it and pull it out. He had to use a drill to dig out all of the pieces, and it was excruciating. I've broken multiple bones including crushing part of my back, I've stabbed myself, I've drilled myself, I've burned myself...a couple years back they started doing a root canal before the numbing agent took affect...NONE of that compared to this. I've been living in constant pain 24/7/365 for 20+ years and this was by far the worst. 

It's been over a week now and it's not fully healed. There is still pain, although it's gotten to the point where I'm not bothering to take pain medicine anymore, I'm used to some pain. I can't guarantee I won't take some later though. 

My point is, if you need to have a tooth removed, do it BEFORE it breaks off. 

To make this somewhat relevant to Cardboard History, here are the three cards I have that are most tooth themed. Racing cards in 1996-97 got weird and in 1997 there was an entire shark themed set for some reason. These were the autograph cards from the set.