A Great Physician Only Cuts So That You Can Be Healed…

I had minor dental surgery today, and I am intrigued as I sit here reflecting on the surgery and the weekend preceding it. I started experiencing pain in a wisdom tooth at the end of May. Since our Alaskan cruise was quickly approaching, I was torn between seeing a dentist and leaving for Alaska with stitches in my mouth, or risking that it wouldn’t get any worse over the course of the vacation. I opted for a compromise. I went to the local pharmacy and picked up a temporary filling kit. I took the little do-it-yourself dental kit home, followed the instructions, filled the hole in the broken tooth, and… Guess what? No more pain. I tucked the kit into my shaving bag the next day as I packed for vacation in case I needed a second treatment. Turns out the filling held up throughout the entire vacation. Not even a Dungeness crab feast was able to crack that filling. Though I was aware that the packaging on the do-it-yourself kit said “temporary filling” and asserted that this was only a short term fix, I felt confident that it would be a long time before I needed to actually see a dentist. Every time the pain returned, I would treat it with another dose of temporary filling and it worked and worked and worked… until it stopped working last week. One and a half months later, it stopped working. Now the pain was getting worse, and funny thing, when I tried to refill the hole, the filling material actually made the pain more intense. That was last Thursday. I called the dentist and left a message… no one returned my call… tomorrow the weekend starts… the pain is getting worse… what will I do? The next thing you know, its Friday night, and the pain is increasing. I took 2 ibuprofen, and an hour later the pain clicked off like a light switch. Ahh! I’ll make it through the weekend with my new friend ibuprofen. Saturday, and the pain is getting worse again… 2 ibuprofen, and the pain was gone. One difference this time, the pain was back in a few hours. This time it kept me up all night, and bothered me all through church Sunday. After church I got some Orajel. That worked to ease the pain and got me through an afternoon of laughing and joking with my in-laws, but it only worked as long as it was in contact with the tooth. As for the rest of the evening, let’s just say that Sunday night was the worst. The pain was so bad that my wife ended up giving me something a little stronger which eased the pain and knocked me out at about 5 a.m. Monday morning.

OK, let me cut to the chase. I had surgery today, Monday. They pulled the tooth, and I was RELIEVED. Here’s the interesting part. The pain and discomfort of the surgery was a great improvement over the pain and discomfort of the toothache. AND guess what? The pain from the surgery will go away in a few days as my mouth heals.

Funny how we put off things that will truly heal us in favor of temporary fixes that give us only an illusion of healing. We go through life trying this and that, getting temporary relief, but never finding the healing… the peace… the WHOLENESS we desire. So many things in life cut us to the very core. So many things create wounds that we carry with us throughout our lives. Some of us have open wounds that bleed on people we meet and soil relationships because we’ve never been truly healed. The wonder of a GREAT PHYSICIAN is the cutting that heals. A great physician only cuts so that you can be healed… made whole. Stop running today, and get some surgery.

Frederick A. Hanna