2003-04-01 - 8:40 p.m.
I could tell by the way the sunrise was already warming up the sky when I got up, that it was going to be a lovely day. I fixed my breakfast (cereal, juice, tea) and took it in to the dining room table where the big east-facing windows were already illuminating the room with honey-colored light. And as usual, I grabbed my current book to read a few pages while I ate.
I like this healthy cereal with the crunchy nuggets....but they seemed extra crunchy today. Wait a minute....what is this in my cereal? A rock?
April Fool.
It was not a rock at all. It was a piece of my TOOTH. I started feeling around in my mouth and felt a jagged hole in the side of one of my teeth. Yikes. Strangely enough, it didn't hurt (well, luckily) but it felt absolutely awful and I was afraid to touch it too much.
I went to work but called the dentist's office as soon as they opened, and managed to persuade them to give me an appoinment.
And so I found myself in the dentist's chair for two and a half hours on April fool's day. My dentist is very good and is especially careful to make everything painless, which is a quality I really appreciate in a dentist. But on this particular day, my body was not being cooperative. Even though he kept giving me additional doses of the anesthetic, and the entire left side of my mouth felt like a house, the nerves in my tooth would not give up and go to sleep. Every time he would start to drill, and then touch some spot and I would jump like I had been shocked. So I'd get some more anethetic. Finally after giving me over twice as much as it was supposed to take, he suggested I just go home and come back and try it again some other day.
Well, I wasn't about to go home with my tooth half ground off, and then have to come back and go through it all again later. So I said, "Just go ahead and do what you need to do and I'll try to tough it out." And that is what we did.
It sounds a lot more macho than it was. He didn't have to touch the nerve very many more times, and I did have a good amount of numbness going. But I felt pretty darn big about it.
And then they performed a series of interesting (but very vile-tasting) processes to re-build the broken tooth and create a temporary crown. I will go back in three weeks to get my permanent crown. And, need I say it, part with a large sum of money.
Sometimes I feel like there is someone out in the universe who monitors my life for any signs of smugness or self-satisfaction and makes certain I take it back. Like just last week I was so excited about paying off my debts, and when payday rolled around (yesterday) I balanced my checkbook and looked with pride at my balance, still so healthy even after bills. Not so fast there, missy.
I think I would prefer to think of it as some sort of cosmic April fool's prank, rather than my comeuppance. At least one person got a worse joke than I did. A man in the dentist's office said a gust of wind grabbed his car door and swung it into his mouth, breaking out his front teeth. And he was calling it an April fool joke, so I guess I can, too.
The dental assistant said they played a joke on one of the doctors by making up a phoney schedule for him with all the patients that were big problems. I never thought about the dentist's office joking about crazy patients. But now that I know, I guess the point is to try to stay off the list.
I did get to enjoy some of the day. I came home after my dental ordeal and went for a long walk. And the rest of the week, I am taking a mini vacation. That's right. For the the next three days, do not think of me in the office, think of me out digging, chopping, cutting, hauling. In other words, trying to salvage our grounds from the ravages of winter and make another earnest but futile attempt to nurture our gardens.
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