on the bright side, i'm drinking a really good milkshake

Hi folks! Today I had half an emergency root canal! It didn't really feel like an *emergency* per se, but it was certainly sudden. I had a headache all day Saturday which turned into a toothache Sunday. Today, the pain on the right side of my face was so bad I felt like somebody cracked me across the jaw with a baseball bat. And not just a regular baseball bat, but the kind with the weight on the end that you use for practicing your swing.

So I called the nice ladies at Laurelhurst Dentistry just to see if they could squeeze me in before my trip on Thursday. I suspected it was just sinus aggravation related to this cold I feel coming on, but I wanted to be on the safe side since I'll be leaving town (and my insurance coverage area) for two weeks. I'd hate to get all the way to Georgia and *then* find out I had an abcess.

And guess what I had? An abcess! Right in the tip end of tooth number on, the right upper wisdom tooth. Recommended intervention? Root canal. They did half today, right there, no wait at all. The other half will be finished up tomorrow by some specialists who only do root canals.

I don't know what the big deal is about root canals. People talk about them like they're the end of the fucking world. Mine was like nothing, and soooooo much less painful than the way my head was feeling BEFORE the root canal. I would've preferred one root canal every hour to that terrible toothache. As I left she added an extra splash of novocaine just to keep the pain down a little longer and wrote me a scrip for Vicodin. Score! And what better excuse than a fat, numb mouth for stopping at Burgerville for an enormous Mocha Perk milkshake?

Oh! I almost forgot the best part! As the very nice dentist lady explained what she was going to do, she pulled out a dental dam and said "I bet this looks familiar." Well, sure, from packets of safer-sex materials, right next to free condoms and flavored lube. Yet, understanding that she was speaking in terms of dentistry and not anonymous lesbian sex, I said that it did *not* in fact look familiar. "You've never had the pleasure of using one of these? You've been missing out!"

The pleasure?? Missing out??

I think she was hitting on me...