Sweet holy Moses

Two weeks after the initial dental visit, the patient returns in order to put the permanent crown onto the exposed tooth stump.

And this is what I had to do today. Of course, like a boxer who steels himself for the one two walloopa punch so that he doesn't end up kissing the canvas (or worse, end up dead), I have been steeling myself for the past two weeks for this procedure.

I knew going into this appointment that the doctor would not give me drugs, shots, gas, or any helpful hints regarding how to tolerate the intense pain I would feel once the temporary came off and the permanent was cemented onto the very sensitive stump. At least Selene got, "Do jumping jack." I got nothing...except for this...

(As Dr. S & M is cleaning the old glue off of the sensitive, exposed stump, I wince in pain)

"Is something a’ matter there?" he said annoyed.

So I mumbled through the mouth filled with tubular gauze (you know, the kind of gauze thingies that are stuffed up bloodied noses - a tiny tampon with no string), "Ah Huts" (translation: It hurts.).

"Well, yes, it will feel a little sensitive to the touch." And then he adds, "When we put the permanent tooth on, it will feel really cool at first. It will take a minute or three for the initial ZING to wear off."

Cool. As in a little cold. Kind of icy. That's the first time in my life I've heard someone equate "coolness" with "intense pain."

But what do I know; I'm just the poor sap who broke her tooth and had the fortunate misfortune of having Dr. S & M, a highly skilled dentist, fix it.

The great thing was that since I've been building it up in my mind for two weeks that this procedure would really, really hurt (and it did hurt - really, really bad), this time around, the procedure didn't hurt as badly as it did when I had another broken tooth fixed a few years back. Of course I had a C-section between the first broken tooth fixing incident and this one.

Although this time around I had the added pleasure of having him put the permanent on and off a few times for adjustment purposes. That was...real...fun...kind of...cool... He's lucky I didn't vomit.

Decisions, decisions

Today I woke up to the pleasant feeling of fire in my bladder. UTI. I knew it from the moment I opened my eyes. Poetroad was not home from the Men’s Retreat yet, the doctor’s office is closed on Sunday, and I had two little ones at home (the two olders were at grandma and grandpa’s, thank the Lord).

After first mentally debating whether or not I could make it through the day, I finally decided to have the doctor paged, and I tried not to think about the discomfort while I waited for the return call. I had two options, he said. Go to Urgent Care or go to Urgent Care. So I took option one…and two.

I despise going to the doctor’s office anyway, but I particularly despise going to a place where there are bound to be high volumes of sick people in one little room. In fact, the only difference between Urgent Care and the Emergency room is that the room is smaller at Urgent Care.

The on call doctor advised me to get there 15 minutes before they opened so I could get in and out in a jiffy. Good call because when I arrived, the waiting room was already 1/3 full. Luckily only four of those people were patients. That made me patient number five.

To make a long story shorter, I was in and out of UC in about an hour with prescription in hand – amazing. By the time I left, there were hoards of coughing and other sorts of sickly people waiting to be seen…it was a longer line than the lines I’ve seen at the DMV. I was sure to make the little ones use hand sanitizer as soon as we stepped out of the building.

And now I am only partially delirious. I’ve taken one dose, but I’m not really feeling the effects of the meds yet. That flu-like brain fog and achy body feeling is not gone. Perhaps I’ll take the next dose now…and go back to bed.

I don't have anything to say,

but I'm tired of looking at that donut. Perhaps if I write enough, then the donut will be pushed far enough down the page that I won't see it. Seeing the donut makes me think of the untamed flesh on my body that got that way from eating donuts. Well, not really from eating donuts - it was the few boxes of chocolate that did me in. Darn Valentines Day. So I'm posting a post about nothing. That's right, nothing. I could blather on and on about nothing until the cows come home, and then I could say more about the same subject. Perhaps the reading of the freshman college papers has put me in this catatonic love of nothing state. You know, the paper that drones on and on - talks in circles - appears to have length and possibly gets close to saying something, but in the end, it really says nothing? Yeah, I still have a stack to finish reading that I put in my coat closet. I put them there so I wouldn't have to look at them. There they sit buried in coats.

be done with donuts
chocolates and freshman work;
all hidden in coats

Spot On

You Are a Powdered Devil's Food Donut

A total sweetheart on the outside, you love to fool people with your innocent image. On the inside you're a little darker, richer, and more complex. You're a hedonist who demands more than one pleasure at a time. Decadent and daring, you test the limits of human indulgence.

What Donut Are You?

enchanted

shapely winter girls
draped in velvet em’rald cloaks;
Costal Mountains sigh

Okay, that was kinda weird...

seeing my post on someone else's blog. Four comments and everything - of course I ruined that by also commenting.

Things have been strange around here. First there was the out of the blue call from Colorado from people we don't even know wanting to interview Poetroad for a job. They flew out here that weekend, and we've chatted a few times since. Still, there's no resolution to that, and I have been laughing at the idea that I had learned to wait patiently on the Lord.

Next, a new semester began at the online high school. We added a few orientation assignments into the mix, and the result was that each teacher was welcomed into the semester with about three hundred assignments needing to be graded. As you can guess, that caused a few rumblings. I was so immersed in the grading that I hardly noticed any difference from that week and the last few weeks of the previous semester. "Welcome to my world, " I wanted to say to the rest of the staff. "Yes, this is what it is like to actually have to grade papers. Oh, and, shut yer yapper, you big cry babies!" Of course a few of the more negative people on staff want heads to roll for this. Good thing the only weight they can hope to throw around is the extra hundred pounds hanging from their butts and bellies. On the up side, at least they aren't fat heads.

Speaking of mutiny, for a second in class yesterday I thought I might be mobbed and burned at the stake. My little darling freshman college writing students turned in papers that read equivalent to garden compost - although people shouldn't really throw human waste into the compost pile. Wondering how to handle this exactly, I took said papers to the Doctor of English (aka head of the department). He encouraged me to mark a point off for every error in conventions (grammar, punctuation, etc.). So I did just that. The result was that a few of my students earned negative scores. This was for a two-page paper. And most were dumb mistakes, too. I asked for a show of hands, "Who exactly had someone edit your paper for you?" Not one hand went up. Still they protested with drivel such as, "I thought you would just grade on content. I didn't know that we would have to write it good or anything like that." I responded with, "Yeah, well this is an English class. In fact, it's a writing class. What would ever give you the idea that I wouldn't be editing for errors in spelling, grammar and punctuation?"

I made it out of class alive just in time to get some major dental work done at Dr. S&M's. Dr. S&M is a minimalist, and that philosophy works great for Interior Decorating. Dentists, however, should employ every gas and drug invented to minimize patient pain. One would think that a painless trip to the dentist would have a patient running back for more, in fact. But my dentist deals in pain. The patient gets two shots to the gums, and a few minutes for the Novocain to do its thing.

One time the dentist was putting a new crown on the stump where a broken tooth had been, and he didn't even offer me a shot to numb that up first. Instead he said, with new porcelain tooth in one hand and the other rubber gloved hand shoved in my mouth, "Now the nurse told you this is going to hurt a bit, right? The pain will subside in a minute or two, though, and you won't have to be bothered by a numb face for half the day."

It hurt like hell.

I cried - this is a woman who has birthed four babies, two without the help of pain medication. On a positive note, I was glad that I had another real life situation in which to utilize those Lamaze breathing techniques.

Anyway, the dentist trip was a travel through painsville, but at least I had that near-student-mob experience fresh in my mind to help distract me from the agony.

And that's the news from my side of the world where the dentists are tough, the women are buff, and the children hand in papers that score below average.

I also like lavender.