Tuesday, July 24, 2012

The Rest of the Story

Sometimes stuff happens and I think, "Oh, I have to tell this story on the blog!" And then I don't. Something else comes up, time passes, and I forget. This is one of those stories I meant to tell you about before.

Back when I was at the Verna Mosquera retreat and blogging from the hotel's business center, I wrote this in one of my posts: "It's a little after 9 p.m. on Saturday night and I'm ready to take a shower and turn in a little early. (Besides, I have a little chocolatty goodness waiting for me on my nightstand alongside my book--some English toffee I picked up at a sweet shop today.)"

After I returned to my hotel room, I took a bath, put my jammies on, and got into bed with my book. After reading for about ten minutes, I reached into the little white paper bag from the sweet shop and broke off a small chunk of English toffee. Yummy! My favorite! Except that when I chewed, I bit down on what I thought was a fragment of walnut shell. I removed it from my mouth and discarded it; I thought, "It's a darn good thing I didn't bite down harder and break a tooth!"

Guess what? No, I didn't break a tooth; not exactly. Not as I thought, anyway. Because what I bit down on wasn't a walnut shell either--it was either a piece of filling or a piece of tooth. I didn't notice it at first, but a little while later, my tongue discovered a hole where there used to be tooth. ARGH!

The damaged tooth was an upper molar--the second one in from the back. I planned to call my dentist that Monday and have it fixed, but when I returned to work after a two-day vacation, my desk was buried, so I thought I'd see the dentist on Tuesday instead. Except I was called in for jury duty on Tuesday. And you know how that went, right? So on Wednesday, I called the dentist and arranged to see him on Friday, when I knew I wouldn't be in court. In the meantime, I ate only fairly soft food and chewed everything on the other side so I didn't further damage the tooth.

It all worked out okay in the end. I'll probably need a crown someday, but for now, my dentist thought a filling would do.

Do you ever have those dreams where your teeth start to disintegrate into chalky dust? Yes, I had at least one of those dreams last week. I asked the dentist, and he said it's a fairly common dream. Pretty disturbing, really. But probably not quite disturbing enough to make me pass up the English toffee the next time I wander into a sweet shop.

4 comments:

pcflamingo said...

Teeth have the worst sense of timing .... I was one day away from a sewing retreat and reluctantly going to work one more day. I was in a mad dash to work, eating peanut butter toast on my way driving to work, and thinking "what is in that peanut butter? Roofing nails?" Yep, I broke a tooth. I pulled over and called my dentist and they got me in later that morning for a temporary crown. It was their "Friday" (even though it was a Thursday) and they stayed open late just for me. Thank goodness, because that tooth was mostly filling and I broke about 3/4 of it off. I was going on a retreat where we had to pack in all our supplies and food through 3 transfers by boat and truck so I would have been stuck with a very sore mouth otherwise.

Miss Jean said...

I was at the movie eating my usual Milk Duds when I bit on something hard. Pulled my crown clean off!

ytsmom said...

OMG! I used to dream like that all the time! Haven't had any bad dreams lately, knock wood!!

DangAndBlast! said...

Goodness! I had a coworker break a tooth on a banana... my dreams are that my teeth are loose - hate it!