Yesterday I had my wisdom teeth removed. Taken out. Extracted. These are all terms used in spycraft. I suppose they're all better than "whacked."

You might ask how the operation went. The answer to that is that I don't know, because I was put under IV sedation.

So what I can't tell you about having knives and forceps and various other devices in my mouth for an hour, I can tell you about being knocked out for 2 hours.

Before this event, I've always had the feeling that I'm oddly protective of my consciousness. I drink from time to time, but I've never gotten drunk. I would never, ever, ever take a psychotropic drug like LSD or "magic mushrooms," even if I could be made to believe they're totally safe, because the idea of being out of control of my mental stasis is a concept I hate. Not "am uncomfortable with," hate.

I tell myself that I don't have the looks, sports skills, or family connections that some people use to make it in life. All I have is my spectacular brain, and screwing with it -- even in a medical setting -- is the sort of thing I like to avoid.

But because of the way my mouth is shaped and the way my wisdom teeth were coming in, IV sedation wasn't an option. Even if it were, I'd probably have taken it anyway, since I'm not a total jackass and I'd take a little cognizant disruption over basic torture anyway.

It went like this:

As soon as I got in the dental chair I was hooked up to a heart monitor, pulseox monitor, and a blood pressure monitor all built into one neat little device. I remember saying to one of the nurses, "pretty multi-talented little machine there."

Soon after they put a nitrous mask on me. Because nobody had said anything about, "we're going to start now," I assumed it was just pumping oxygen and the nitrous wasn't turned on yet.

I could see that my heart rate was pretty high, evidence that I was more nervous than I would have thought.

I was given a paper to sign, my consent for the whole operation. The nurse holding the clipboard had to point exactly to the line I was supposed to sign, but I started to sign on the line next to it. Then the line under it. Ok, that was a little weird, I thought.

Then the oral surgeon-slash-anesthesiologist ran an IV into my right hand. My right hand. It didn't sting as much as that usually does, I realized, and then I realized that the wall I was facing, decorated with multiple photographs of somebody's baby daughter pinned to a cork board, was moving away from me. I tried to consider that this was an unusual thing, but my brain didn't agree with me.

"There's nitrous running through this now, isn't there?" I said out loud.

Two people confirmed this.

"OK," I said, "I just wanted to make sure I wasn't just freaking out." I tried to laugh at that, but the universe was kind of bouncing up and down and distracting me from my thoughts.

I didn't realize until afterwords that they had me sign the consent after the gas mask went on. I don't think such a thing would hold up in court.

Soon after an assistant was putting a black, rubber bite guard in my mouth between my teeth. I kept adjusting my mouth so that she could slide it in, like picking my teeth with my tongue, but she told me that it was already in place. Whoopsie.

The oral surgeon was back at the IV in my hand. My right hand. I made a point not to look at it, knowing that's the sort of thing that could make me pass out. I knew she was injecting something. I heard her ask a nurse to pass her the ketamine. Or did she say ketorolac. What are those?

Ketorolac is a pain killer, I think, they gave it to me when I had my kidney stones.

Ketamine I've heard of on the news or TV somewhere. I think they first

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And that was it.

As the corners of my consciousness gave way and I could feel myself neither away nor asleep, but aware of my existence, I heard that my dad was in the room now.

I heard the surgeon say, "fighting" and "IV" and "left a piece in there so....x-ray...so you know."

The part of me that hates being out of control was starting to rouse. I was floating in a kind of brain soup. I slapped my face with my right hand and snapped my fingers in front of my eyes to try to get myself to focus.

A nurse asked what I was doing. I tried to reply, but there was something in my mouth. The nurse said to just relax, and leaned me back in the chair.

I cant relax if I know my brain isn't working.

I was looking at my right hand now. There was no IV in it. I looked down, the IV was in my left hand now. There was a big patch of blood on my pants, just where my right hand would be.

Uh oh.

Soon I heard a nurse or assistant talking to my dad about the book he was reading. I couldn't tell if I was dreaming or not.

I heard the flicking sound of his cell phone opening, and in a few seconds heard him on the phone with someone talking about needing help carrying me.

Carrying me?

After some time there was a wheelchair brought up to the chair I was in, and someone said I would be getting in. Simple enough, I thought. I willed myself to sit up and spin around, but found myself trapped in inertia and bouncing off the wall, then the ceiling, then floating up out of the building and up over the city. I waved down at the gorillas in the Detroit Zoo, and then hoping I didn't fall into Lake Huron because I'm afraid of open water.

That seemed a bit strange to me.

Somehow I got into the wheelchair and was wheeled out the back entrance towards the car. Three people were helping me up and into the car. One said not to look down at my feet, so I looked straight up at the sky and she said not to do this either.

I could tell I was being treated this way because I was out of my mind, and I didn't like this. I summoned whatever control I could muster over my mind and body (cough), grabbed the roof of the car and the door by myself, and vaulted myself into the seat.

On the way back home, I tried to ask my dad pertinent questions but for the gauze in my mouth and the hole in my brain I couldn't make sense of them.

Eventually he got it through my brain that they'd had to double my dosage of sedative because while I was under I kept fighting them off.

I'd pulled the IV out of my right hand. That's why my leg was covered in my blood.

Even after the second dose, I was still being a right bastard so the surgeon had to rush everything. She said she left a piece of one of my wisdom teeth down in my gums. She couldn't fish it out because I wouldn't hold still long enough. It wasn't connected to anything, it's just entombed there in my gums forever. Future dentists might see it on an x-ray and wonder what that was about.

I thought that if I were ever burned to death, that would make my dental signature pretty unique. Random piece of tooth just stuck in there behind my cheek and inside my gums. It would make it harder for me to ever fake my death.

The reason I was still completely out of it, and why I sat in a chair at home for about an hour unable to move or think afterwords, was because of the double dose.

The problem, I've come to understand, is because I wasn't given straight-up anesthesia like in a hospital. True anesthetics like sodium tripentathol completely paralyze you. What they use in dentists offices is called "IV sedation," or "deep sedation," which is like a really strong nap. Real anesthesia is very dangerous and is administered by some of the highest-trained and highest-paid doctors out there. "Deep sedation" has less risk and is easier to train for, but it doesn't have the lovely paralytic effect of general anesthesia.

Ketamine, in lesser doses than I was probably given, is used recreationally because it causes hallucinations and puts you in a dream-like state. Kids on the street call it "falling into a K-hole," or they mix it with cocaine and call it Special K. It's basically medicinal PCP. PCP is also one of the drugs I'd never do, because I don't like being out of my brain.

So as for the wisdom teeth thing, it's fine. I've got funky stitches on the inside of my cheeks, I can't open my mouth wider than an inch without hurting, and I've put myself on a liquid diet because chewing solids feels kind of like being kicked in the teeth. I can deal with that, though. Vicodin helps.

The downer for me is knowing what I went through to be sedated. I don't like knowing that I was fighting people and pulling IVs out of my arms while in some kind of tranced, fugue state. I don't like there being any amount of time in my life that I can't account for, but at least I can't rightly be held accountable for.

And after all, I'm kind of glad I got some first-hand experience with both nitrous and ketamine because I actually intend to use them in a future story project and I now know I can do so from experience and not just endless research.