Pain & Surprise

That's what I felt today at lunchtime. I was just sitting there as I always do--Wolfing my sandwich in my reclining easy chair upstairs while playing solitaire on my iPod. I was on the last bite of my sandwich when...

CRUNCH!!

It wasn't an ordinary crunch. It was a crunch laced with pain. It was also a very deafening crunch. I spit my last partially-chewed bite (ewww!) back into the ziplock bag and carefully examined it. I was hoping to find one of those "bits" that inadvertently make it through the manufacturing process and end up in lunch meats occasionally. While I was doing that, my tongue was gingerly running over my teeth. Nothing seemed amiss, but in my mind I somehow knew the answer to what it was, and I was right. While all my teeth seemed intact, they were most definitely not so. I had literally split one of them down the middle.

While I was lucky I wasn't in pain afterward, it was most definitely a place in my mouth to avoid touching. If my tongue hit it the wrong way it would move considerably. I was upset. It's bad enough to have to deal with bad teeth all your life, and perhaps a bad checkup (the kind where they hand you a list of things wrong). Those are things you schedule in to get them done. This was not something I could put off obviously. What made it worse (in my little bitty mind anyway) was that I was hoping to find a new dentist because I was having doubts about my old one. Well, to find a new dentist you have to look right? I never did that part... Anyway, after a few phone calls (I had a list of insurance-approved dentists) netted me nil, I sighed and went to my "old" one after work.

The bottom line? The base seems intact enough, so they measured me for a crown. Now I'm wearing a temporary. Dinner tonight was less than pain-free, but it's still kinda soon to tell. It's over two weeks before the real (read that EXPENSIVE) crown is finished. I had a very uncomfortable visit to the dentist this time. Usually I'm fine with them but not this time. I was angry, uneasy, and nervously awaiting inevitable bad news I guess. That's the emotional difference between being proactive and reactive.

So what else is new? Nothing earth-shattering. It's getting cold and we want our woodstove to be finished and operational. It's close--VERY close. We're hoping this weekend will finish it up. We're down to the dreaded "cut-a-hole-in-the-perfectly-good-roof" stage.

I would bite my fingernails in mock nervousness, but it's still too tender.