Thursday, January 23, 2014

Counted in Tooth Time

Is there any day longer than the one in which you are waiting for your emergency appointment to get the tooth you broke eating dinner the night before fixed? That molar, way at the back of the top of your mouth, already set with a deep filling, and feeling funny for awhile—not painful, just not right—which managed to break while eating an extremely soft homemade hot beef sandwich? Not the tooth you had scheduled to have pre-emptively drilled in February, to take out the silver filling which is expanding over time and slowly breaking the tooth apart; no, this is another tooth, another special snowflake in a mouth full of special needs.

I cannot get this thing taken care of fast enough. It hurts, and I'm drooling. It's not pretty.

Of course, as I think about the pain of the procedure—the drilling, the fact that I can't seem to ever get numb (so cue the multiple shots, plus pain anyway), the noise, the stuffed up nose that makes me feel like I am choking and/or suffocating during the most intense moments of tooth excavation, the anxiety about the cost (I can't possibly have any funds left in my dental insurance after my year of root canal/double tooth pull/root canal)—time seems to fly. Can't I have a few more hours before I need to endure all that? Gulp.

It's tooth time, the paradox where time is perceived as both dragging and racing, all with the heart-thumping as a bass line, keeping (worried) time.

I'm pretty sure days like today are why God created the people who created pharmaceutical companies, who in turn created Xanax. I'd like to have an active prescription on file for my own little pile of anti-anxiety meds for my seemingly endless dental emergencies—that's a thing, right? Chronic Dental Mishap-Related Anxiety? CDMRA, anyone? 

I can see the commercial now, with a person walking up to a dental office, trying to open the door, then running away. Cut to a consultation with a friendly, smiling doctor, then a sheepish grin for the patient, holding the prescription and/or pills in his/her hand. Last shots would include the person walking up to the dental chair, sitting down, and looking relaxed. I'm pretty sure that following the dental work, he/she would exit the office and run directly into a sunny field full of wildflowers, smiling from ear-to-ear, with all those recently fixed teeth glowing in the light.

Yeah, I need some of that, wildflowers included.

Appointment at 2:00.

1 comment:

  1. OK, I see the Xanax reference, but didn't you get any??

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