Tuesday November 6, 2007 9:31 PM

Those terrible rotten stumps of teeth that used to be in Jim's mouth are now OUT. Thank God.

Decidua's office told us to get to the hospital at 7:15 a.m. yesterday. So I had to get my in-laws to come down Sunday and spend the night to get Jimmy ready for school in the a.m. and Jim and I left for Philly at about 6:15. THEY DIDN'T TAKE HIM BACK TO GET PREPPED FOR SURGERY UNTIL 11:30! Can you believe that? After we had sat there for a couple of hours I talked to the charge nurse and found out that Decidua had two procedures in front of Jim. So there was NEVER any reason for Jim and I to be there that early. A TOTAL disrespect of our time. You can imagine how hot I was. I told the charge nurse to let Decidua know that he better find some aloe vera gel because I was gonna make his ears burn when I got a hold of him. And I did. But he blamed it on his office staff. Yeah, right.

Remember the debate last week about whether or not Jim was getting implants? I saw the release form that Jim signed when he went for his pre-op testing and he could have nipped that in the bud a long time ago. The implants were not on the release form. If he had actually READ the thing before he signed it we could have ironed this out in advance, but it's water under the bridge now. I made the nurse amend the release and I told Jim to not let them knock him out until he heard from Decidua's lips that he would do those implants during the tooth pull.

I had to wait in the happy-happy-joy-joy room again. A couple of dirty old men were chatting it up with me....I managed to avoid them for awhile reading a book but when I finished the whole book from cover to cover I couldn't keep avoiding them. One of them was there for his wife who had a mass on her pancreas. Boy, I'm glad we're not in that position. No matter what you're going through there's always someone worse off than you. Then thankfully they called me over to talk with Decidua. The first thing out of his mouth was, "I'm glad you and your husband decided to go with the implants. It will hold the lower dentures in so much better." I told him, "We never DIDN'T decide to go with them. I don't know where this whole debate CAME from."

Jim had to sleep it off for awhile so we didn't get out of Philly until about 6:30 pm. He had quite a bit of bleeding from his mouth all night but it finally calmed down by this morning. He says he feels pretty good. He doesn't have much pain. They wrote him a script for percocet but he hasn't needed to take any so far. I'm worried about him losing more weight by not eating so I keep putting food in front of him and making him eat it. He would never make the effort to make himself something. Sure, he can't chew, but he can have soup. He's not a good patient. He's a total pain in the ass.

So now he's got to heal for six weeks and then he'll get his teeth.