A little while ago, I had this gum surgery called a "gingiva graft" because, well, a bit of a recession in my gums became a bit of a tear, and it had to be repaired.

I wrote down some of my thoughts on the whole process; enough so that I could fill up an entire "department" on this website. I told the tale from tear to repair and beyond. And, as is so often the case with me, the story was more complicated than it absolutely had to be.

As I was looking into having the work done, a friend of mine who had had similar work done was a great resource. A veritable font (fount?) of knowledge. She told me that she had done quite a bit of research into the subject online before she had the work done, and so she was able to give me some tips on things to watch for.

Because my site is regularly monitored by the search engines, my essays about my own experience with the gum surgery have popped up on a number of searches being conducted by other kind souls who are now investigating having the work done for themselves. From time to time, they post comments on the site, and from time to time, they send me e-mail directly.

It's an interesting phenomenon, insofar as the only expertise I really have with regard to gingiva grafts is the fact that I had one . -- well, three, depending upon how you want to count -- and now I'm being asked about this case or that case, and do I think it's normal for this or that to be happening? That's the most common question: "Is this normal?"

Do I have opinions? Sure! And I'm happy to offer them . . . although, as usual, I'm a little bit lagging in my e-mail response time. I still haven't replied to everyone who has wished me a happy birthday, and that was almost a month ago. But I'm happy to talk with anybody who wants to talk about it.

[As one friend of mine put it (in her inimitably delicate way), I have a knack for sounding like an expert even when I have very little to go on. Which I take to mean, I talk about stuff even when I don't know as much about stuff as I should.]

But, the thing is: I'm still not an expert on the whole gum surgery thing. I'm only a guy who had an experience with it as a patient. What a find really cool about the whole situation, though, is that people are posting their own experiences (in the form of comments) to this site, which means that now there's more information here than just my own blathering on the topic.

Which brings me to my point:

I'm going in on Friday to have all four of my wisdom teeth extracted. The oral surgeon is going to have me put under general anesthetic. I've never been put under general anesthetic, and I'm not looking forward to this at all. Everyone I talk to about having wisdom teeth out tells me a horror story of one sort or another; if the problem wasn't with the extraction, or the healing, it was with the billing or some other aspect.

I feel like I should be making out a will before I go in for the extractions.

Is this normal?