Dental musings

Five and a half hours is a long time to be in a dentist chair. Fifteen-plus shots is a lot for a mouth to handle. But the look on my dentist's face when he contemplated the $4000+ fee for the morning's work, thus paying for his next European vacation? Priceless.

(I kid. Perhaps I only paid for his next trip to Hawaii. It's hard to say.)

I had the TV to keep me amused, which was fabulous. It's suspended in such a way over the chair that you can see it when you are tipped all the way back, mouth gaping open. Suspended over your face in such a way that you spend about five minutes contemplating the bolts holding it to the ceiling, and wondering if there was a 6.0 earthquake (like in Wells, NV yesterday), would the TV come crashing down onto your head?

I got to watch the news (CNN, MSNBC, Fox), Mythbusters (confirmed: the faster you go over a washboard dirt road, the smoother the ride; busted: you can have a car stereo big and loud enough to explode your car), the end of the classic movie "An Affair to Remember", and...I don't really remember what else. Some History Channel stuff about bridges, and a National Geographic thing on big spiders. It's a little hazy, given the amount of novacaine I had in my mouth.

But one thing to take away from this appointment (besides a beautiful, fixed mouth)(mostly): I have an especially thick jaw, especially around the hinge. Like more jawbone then most people have. So, LaDale, if you want some, apparently I have bone to spare. Too bad I can't share the wealth. (Bytheway*, this came up because the dentist had to give me FIVE shots to do one tooth in the back, because my jawbone was so thick it was making it really hard for the numbing stuff to get to the nerve.)

*John!