If my life were a series of questionable encounters with medical professionals, it would be titled “Abena vs. Her Own Body” and it would have seven seasons, each one more dramatic than the last, with a surprise finale involving a sideways tooth and two weeks of Vaseline.
I have had surgeries. Several. More than the average person and fewer than I sometimes feel like given the collective chaos they have produced. Some were necessary. Some were my body deciding it had opinions about continuing to function normally. One was a tooth that was simply built wrong and wanted everyone to know about it.
After my most recent wisdom tooth situation in Ghana — which I will get to, and which deserves its own documentary — I sat down and thought: it is time. Time to rank them. Time to give each one the thorough, honest, slightly unhinged review it deserves.
So here we are.
I am ranking every surgery I have ever had on two scales because one scale is not sufficient to capture the full experience of being me in a medical setting:
Pain Scale — how much it hurt, straightforwardly, out of 10.
Chaos Scale — how much it disrupted my entire existence, dignity, sense of self, and general will to continue. Also out of 10.
Let us begin.
Left Bottom Wisdom Tooth Extraction (Ghana)
Pain Scale: 10/10 | Chaos Scale: 11/10
I want to start by telling you what a wisdom tooth extraction is supposed to be like.
You go in. They numb you. They remove the tooth. You go home with some gauze and a list of soft foods and maybe a mild painkiller and you are fine within a few days.
That is what it is supposed to be like.
What happened to me was something else entirely.
My left bottom wisdom tooth was sideways. Not slightly tilted. Not at a mild angle. Fully, defiantly, structurally sideways — oriented horizontally inside my jaw like it had decided it was going to go a different direction from everyone else and nothing was going to change that. It had also, over time, been causing problems for the neighboring teeth because apparently one rogue tooth can just decide to bully everyone around it and that is allowed.
So it had to come out.
I arrived at the clinic with the energy of someone who has survived things before. “I've got this,” I thought. “It's a tooth. I am a person who has had actual organs removed. A tooth is fine.”
Reader. A tooth was not fine.
The moment they started I understood that I had fundamentally misread the situation. My jaw was stretched open to a width I did not know my jaw could achieve. We are talking pizza dough territory. We are talking dimensions that should not be available to a human mouth. The entire left side of my face was numbed, which sounds like a mercy until you realize that numb does not mean you cannot feel pressure, and the pressure of someone extracting a sideways tooth from your jaw is an experience that lives in a category of its own.
The nurse, at some point during this process, said: “You're doing great.”
For what? Existing? Keeping my eyes open? Because those were the only things I was doing and I was barely managing either.
And then it was over and I thought: okay. Worst part done.
It was not the worst part.
The worst part was the dry socket.
For those who do not know what dry socket is, let me explain it in the most honest terms available: when a tooth is extracted, a blood clot forms in the socket to protect the bone and nerve underneath while healing happens. Dry socket is when that clot dislodges or dissolves before the healing is done, leaving the bone and nerve exposed.
To open air.
To everything.
Dry socket is the dental equivalent of someone removing the protective covering from a wound and then blowing on it. Constantly. For days. It is the kind of pain that makes you personally angry — not sad, not defeated, angry — because it feels deeply unfair and also completely unstoppable and you cannot even complain properly because your mouth is a construction site.
I was mad. Not in pain and sad. In pain and furious.
The swelling defied physics. The corner of my mouth developed sores from being stretched during the procedure. My homemade saline solution was a disaster that I do not want to discuss in detail. The Vaseline — applied to the corner sores — was the only thing standing between me and complete breakdown and I want Vaseline to know that I appreciate it.
Two weeks of this. Two weeks of no chewing, limited talking, a face that looked like it had been in a disagreement with something much larger than a tooth, and a jaw that had clearly not forgiven me for any of it.
Real-time thoughts during surgery:
Mandibular Fracture Repair (Canada)
Pain Scale: 9/10 | Chaos Scale: 10/10
I broke my jaw.
I fell. And hit the ground. And my jaw, which had apparently not been consulted on how this landing should go, fractured.
That is the story. We are moving on.
The fracture required surgery. The surgery required wiring my mouth shut. And wiring your mouth shut means exactly what it sounds like — your teeth are wired together, your jaw is immobilized, and the things you previously took completely for granted, like opening your mouth, are now simply not available to you.
No talking. Not properly. Not in the way where someone on the other end of the conversation can understand what you are saying without effort and interpretation and occasionally just giving up.
No chewing. At all. Everything that entered my body during this period was liquid. Every meal was an engineering problem. Drinking anything required calculating the precise angle at which to tilt the cup so that liquid could navigate the small gap available without going somewhere unexpected, which it frequently did anyway, because liquid does not respect your carefully calculated angles when your jaw is wired shut.
Every sip of water was a math problem I was solving with a compromised brain.
My face, for the record, looked like a low-budget action movie extra who had lost a fight. Not a good fight. Not a cool fight. The kind of fight where the other party was apparently the ground and the ground won comprehensively.
The hospital nurses were kind. They were also, and I say this with full understanding because I would have done the same thing, trying very hard not to laugh while I attempted to drink soup through a jaw that was wired closed. I could see it in their faces. The professional composure holding on by a thread while I tilted, missed, tilted again, missed again, and then sat there with soup on my shirt having achieved nothing.
Real-time thoughts:
Tonsillectomy (Ghana)
Pain Scale: 8/10 | Chaos Scale: 9/10
I am, under normal circumstances, a talker.
This is not a confession. This is a fact about me that anyone who has spent more than fifteen minutes in my company has already confirmed. I talk. I have things to say. I say them. This is simply who I am and I have made peace with it.
The tonsillectomy took this from me for eight days.
Eight days of no talking. Not reduced talking. Not quiet talking. No talking. Every attempt at speech was a direct confrontation with my throat, which had recently been operated on and was absolutely not interested in being used for communication or any other purpose. Every yawn was a negotiation I lost. Every swallow was an event that required psychological preparation. Every cough was something I would not wish on anyone.
I developed, out of necessity, a sign language system. It was not a good system. It was not a recognized system. It was a collection of gestures that made complete sense to me and approximately zero sense to anyone I was trying to communicate with.
I went to order coffee during this period.
I gestured. I pointed. I made a shape with my hands that I felt clearly communicated “medium, black, no sugar.” The barista looked at me with the expression of someone who has seen many things in their career but not this specific sequence of hand movements from a person who appeared otherwise functional.
They gave me something. I don't remember if it was what I ordered. It was warm and it went down carefully and that was all I needed.
Also: nosebleeds. Because the universe has a sense of humor and apparently thought that a healing throat was not enough to manage and added occasional nosebleeds to the experience. For variety. For flavor. For the specific comedy of having a problem with one part of your face and then developing an additional, unrelated problem with a neighboring part of your face.
Real-time thoughts:
Myomectomy with Ovarian Cyst Removal (Canada)
Pain Scale: 7/10 | Chaos Scale: 6/10
Laparoscopic surgery. Minimally invasive, they said. Small incisions, they said.
And technically this is true. There are no external stitches to speak of. From the outside I looked relatively fine. From the inside I was a person whose abdominal area had recently been operated on and was communicating this information continuously and with great clarity.
The hospital gave me a gown.
Hospital gowns are a choice that someone made at some point in medical history and I have questions about that choice. They cover the parts they are supposed to cover. They also do not cover a meaningful amount of everything else. You are simultaneously dressed and undressed in a way that satisfies no one. You feel like a person wearing a large decorative napkin and trying to be dignified about it.
I was a human burrito. Wrapped in blankets because the gown was not doing its job thermally, moving through the ward with the careful, deliberate slowness of someone who has recently been informed by their body that fast movements are not currently on the menu.
Rolling to the bathroom with an IV attached felt like navigating an obstacle course that someone designed specifically for people who are in no condition to navigate obstacle courses. The IV stand had wheels. The wheels had opinions about which direction they wanted to go. My body had opinions about moving at all. We compromised, slowly, in the direction of the bathroom, the IV stand occasionally deciding to go a different way entirely.
Real-time thoughts:
Partial Nephrectomy (Canada)
Pain Scale: 8/10 | Chaos Scale: 4/10
Part of my kidney was removed.
I want to be clear that this felt exactly as serious as it sounds. The pain management protocols were good — the hospital knew what it was doing and the medication did what medication is supposed to do — but underneath the medication was an awareness that my body had recently undergone something significant and was not going to let me forget it.
From the outside this entry looks calm. I was in a hospital bed. I watched television. I had monitors. Someone brought me things at regular intervals. The chaos scale is low because the environment was controlled and the staff were competent and nothing went sideways in the dramatic ways that other entries on this list went sideways.
But I want the record to reflect: it felt like something. It felt like quite a lot of something, actually, in a deep and constant and unavoidable way. The television was cope. The calm face was cope. I was watching whatever was on and thinking about the fact that I had fewer kidney than I'd started the day with and processing that information in the way you process information when there is nothing else you can do except lie still and let the medication do its job.
Real-time thoughts:
Total Nail Avulsion (Canada)
Pain Scale: 6/10 | Chaos Scale: 5/10
My entire nail was removed.
The procedure itself was what it was. What followed was two weeks of navigating the world with a finger that had recently been through something and was sensitive about it in the way that only extremities can be — acutely, constantly, and in response to things that should not logically cause pain, like air.
Typing happened one finger at a time. Walking barefoot was a threat assessment exercise. Every surface was evaluated for its potential to make contact with the affected area. I became briefly but intensely aware of how many things in a normal day require the use of the specific finger that had just been through an avulsion.
Sage, my cat, was not helpful during this period.
I want to be fair to Sage. Sage did not cause the nail situation. Sage was simply present during the recovery period and was, by any objective measure, unsympathetic. She assessed the situation, noted that I was moving slowly and carefully and clearly managing something, and concluded that this was my problem and not hers. She was not unkind. She was simply operating as a cat operates, which is to say entirely in her own interest and with no particular concern for my nail.
I sent texts one finger at a time during this period. Each text took approximately three times as long as normal. Sage watched me do this. Her expression communicated nothing except mild contempt for the pace.
Real-time thoughts:
Right Bottom Wisdom Tooth Extraction (Ghana)
Pain Scale: 2/10 | Chaos Scale: 1/10
After everything on this list — after the sideways tooth apocalypse, the wired jaw, the silent eight days, the kidney, the nail, the gown situation — the right bottom wisdom tooth extraction was so smooth and so manageable that I genuinely did not know what to do with myself.
The tooth cooperated. The procedure was straightforward. The recovery involved ice packs and soft foods and a completely reasonable amount of discomfort that responded to completely reasonable pain management.
I sat in recovery thinking: is this what it's supposed to feel like?
It was. It was what it was supposed to feel like. The right tooth was not sideways. The right tooth was not on a personal mission. The right tooth came out like a tooth is supposed to come out and then I went home and was fine.
After the left tooth experience I had prepared extensively. I had the right clinic. I had the Vaseline ready. I had soft foods organized. I had mentally prepared for another two weeks of chaos and fury.
I needed none of it. I was fine in days.
The dental gods, having apparently gotten everything out of their system with the left tooth, looked down at the right tooth situation and decided: this one she gets for free.
Real-time thoughts:
Final Rankings
| Surgery | Pain | Chaos |
|---|---|---|
| Left Wisdom Tooth (Ghana) | 10/10 | 11/10 |
| Mandibular Fracture Repair (Canada) | 9/10 | 10/10 |
| Tonsillectomy (Ghana) | 8/10 | 9/10 |
| Partial Nephrectomy (Canada) | 8/10 | 4/10 |
| Myomectomy with Cyst Removal (Canada) | 7/10 | 6/10 |
| Total Nail Avulsion (Canada) | 6/10 | 5/10 |
| Right Wisdom Tooth (Ghana) | 2/10 | 1/10 |
What I Actually Learned From All of This
Preparation is everything. The difference between the left wisdom tooth and the right one was not the tooth — it was the clinic, the readiness, the knowledge of what was coming. The difference between the kidney and the jaw was not the severity — it was the environment and the support around it.
Pain is relative and chaos is its own category entirely. A nail avulsion is not a kidney removal. But a nail avulsion when you are alone with an unsympathetic cat and have to type one finger at a time has a chaos quotient that deserves acknowledgment.
Your body will humble you. It does not matter how many things you have survived before. The next thing will find a new way to remind you that you are operating on borrowed cooperation and you should be grateful for every day the parts are working as intended.
And finally: Vaseline. Stock it. Always. For reasons you cannot anticipate in advance but will be grateful for when the moment arrives.
In Conclusion
I have had parts removed. I have had my jaw wired shut. I have had a tooth extracted that apparently had architectural opinions about its own position. I have worn a hospital gown that covered nothing meaningfully and I have rolled an IV stand down a corridor at 2am and I have sent seven-word texts over the course of four minutes while a cat watched without sympathy.
I survived all of it.
Not gracefully. Not without complaint. Not without two weeks of dry socket fury and a collection of saline-related mistakes and a sign language system that helped no one.
But I survived.
And if you are currently in a hospital gown, or managing a dry socket, or trying to drink soup through a wired jaw, or sitting next to a cat who has assessed your situation and found it uninteresting —
You will survive too.
Stock up on Vaseline.
Choose your clinic wisely.
And if the tooth is sideways, ask questions before they start.
Trust me on this one.