So it's official. I've entered my elder years. I know this, because I have now had to endure the kind of dental work I only ever heard my grandparents talk about.
About 10 years ago, while camping in Connecticut, I broke a molar while eating one of the mushiest foods ever, a soft, cheesy breadstick. After breaking off a chunk of said tooth, Miss Serious and Big Trouble insisted that I leave it under my pillow. The next morning, as the sun rose over our little tent, I reached under my pillow and discovered a dollar bill that had been torn in half. The Professor must have his little jokes....
Upon returning to Chez Necessity, my dentist put a sort of wall around the tooth, and basically gave my a gigantic filling. He stated, not in a particularly comforting way, "It might work." It did, but my new dentist has been eyeing it since I started seeing him, and finally convinced me that I would rather take care of it on my own terms rather than when it breaks (and he assured me that it definitely would).
My dentist is an older, Russian gentleman with an accent so thick that everything he says sounds like a Dostoyevsky novel. I did not quite understand what getting a crown entailed, and would have enjoyed remaining blissfuly ignorant, but after he finished drilling my tooth, he gave me a mirror so I could see what he had done. Appalled, I gazed at the nub of what used to be a tooth that he had created in my mouth. He stuck the temporary crown on top of this horror, and sent me on my way.
Two weeks later, weeks in which I learned that it is possible to only chew on one side of your mouth, I returned for the permanent crown. I was thinking of asking him if I could have it bejeweled, but I decided that it is unwise to kid around with the person who holds the dental drill. After my second shot of novocaine (the first one served only to numb my neck, an odd sensation at the best of times), my permanent crown was attached to my little tooth nub, and now lives with me forever. I'm feeling more royal already - maybe I'll pick up a Corgi.
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