So, like many other people, I have a mouth, and it's pretty handy. Aside from brushing and using it to eat I haven't really given it much thought since I got my braces out about four years ago.

Until a few days ago. There wasn't as much of what I'd call pain in as much as a consistent throb for the better part of the day.

This brought back into focus a really strange bit of my anatomy: stubborn teeth. My baby teeth didn't fall out until much later than they should have - some of them still had roots and needed to be pulled to make way from the permanent ones that were blasting through the gum line.

However, things pretty much stopped there. The so-called "twelve-year molars" - molars which are supposed to appear at the age of twelve - never really came in. One of them is twisted towards the rest of my teeth, but none of that was a problem unless they start to move.

Six years later, they're finally starting to move, which means I'll be having the first surgery of my life on this upcoming Thursday. While I'm under, it's hoped that the oral surgeon will be able to go up in there and extract my wisdom teeth, which, as of my last panoramic X-ray, are still tooth buds. I was only half-joking when I told my dentist that, if left to their own devices, I'd get my wisdom teeth at around the age of forty.

As I mentioned, this is my first surgery, and it will be the first time I'll be knocked out by an anesthesiologist. I'm not scared of the process by any means - practically everyone goes through this rite of passage into adulthood, after all - but I'm kind of curious as to what the stuff will actually do to me. My family medical history when it comes to anesthesia is weird and hilarious.

My grandmother - whose favorite movie is Kill Bill and has a picture of the "brushie brushie brushie" bat framed in her guest bedroom - has undergone a couple of surgeries in her 73 years of life. When my dad was in high school, he witnessed her as she was waking up from anesthesia, singing a semi-lewd variation of "Do Your Ears Hang Low." Her sister was horrified, but that didn't keep her from laughing her head off (or bringing it up at family reunions, much to my grandmother's chagrin).

When it was time for my dad to get put under, they gave him a dose of anesthesia and then told him to count backwards from ten in order to see if he'd been knocked out. He did so without falling asleep. They doubled the dose and again he counted backwards from ten without any trouble. After a third dose, they told him to count back from 100 and he got to about 15 before finally passing out. He woke up about ten hours later.

With these stories on my paternal side, I can only hope I take after the maternal side and react to being under like a normal person.