Blog
Dentist
Some History
I really don't have much to say here, was mostly just playing around on my desktop and decided and this is the easiest "project" to make sure my dev environment is working in. That's really why we are here. But I did go to the dentist for the first time in several years. I don't think I was actually avioding going, moreso than I think I've never scheduled a dentist appointment for myself. I went all the time when my mom made the appointment, and then I went this time when Sam did it. Not exactly something to be proud of, but I just never think to do it.
I have had pretty bad luck with my teeth. In sixth grade I ran into a wall during basketball practice and broke my two front teeth about in half. I didn't lose my baby teeth in that position until second grade, so I only got 4 years of real use out of them. They won't do crowns on 6th graders so they just kinda put the resin they use for fillings (or something like it) and shape it to look like a tooth. I could always see the line, and that resin stuff is not meant to last forever, even in more secure molar fillings. When it's all hanging off the front tooth it breaks rather easily. So I was a pretty regular customer, getting my "teeth" added back on after each time they broke. The most fun instance was during a soccer game where the opposing team elbowed me in the face at the start of a corner kick. Like three of us got attacked at the start of the corner, so I think it was coached. The ref missed it, as they tend to do, and I had to ask him if I could take my teeth to the sideline before the start of the next play. I trotted over and just kinda dropped them in my coaches hand. I, of course, had no use for the parts that fell off, that's just resin, but I was just trying to make the ref feel bad and freak out my coach.
The other two instances, that I remember, were a particularly hard cookie, and at a theme park. The cookie is almost self explanatory, I bit it and my teeth fell out. The theme part was a little more exciting, it was one of the water rides where everyone is strapped into seats around a circular raft, facing inwards. It just bumps the whole time and splashes random people, but somehow I wound up on one, unsupervised, with a friend or a cousin I can't remember. The important detail is that he was another boy my age, so, naturally, we unhooked ourselves and were running across the raft to various seats before each impact, and one impact threw my head into the seat. I'm sure that's how I explained it to my parents.
This occasional drama ended my freshman year in college. I started noticing a pain, at first it was in the back of my jaw and pretty mild. I hadn't yet had a cavity, so I didn't know what they felt like so I assumed that's what it was. It moved forward to the front of my mouth, and got worse, fast, My (then) girlfriend (now wife) insisted it was just a cavity and I was being a baby. I lived with it for two days just to get to the dentist appointment. The night before the appointment I did not sleep at all, just a continuously throbbing, serious pain all night long. I took like 3 showers, and pulled up to the dentist an hour before they opened and like three hours before my appointment. He just soaked a cloth in liquid nitrogen and touched it to an adjacent tooth, which hurt very bad, and I braced for him to touch it to the tooth that did hurt, one of the front ones that cracked so long ago. But absolutely nothing The nerve was long dead, and I was feeling pressure from an infection in the root. I'd need a root canal and he could get me in, in a month. I thought there was no way I would last a month. He did give me a real painkiller and some antibiotics. I'm a wuss about real painkillers so I only took half a pill that night. I didn't really "sleep", I just laid there in some sort of delusion where I was trying to do math but the symbols kept floating around, so I couldnt make any progress. My mom picked me up the next day, drove me back to Bartlesville, because she had found someone who could do the double root canal in that same week. The procedure wasn't that bad, but the guy said my tooth just exploded when he drilled into it. They had to let it drain for a couple days before they'd finish up. And, by that point, they were willing to do the crowns, so I got them as well.
This Trip
Literally nothing exciting, had to get a filling replaced.