Lifestyle snapshot.
Looking over my entries for the past couple of days, I haven't been writing nearly as well as I would have liked, nor about the things that I've been concerned about the most lately. Frankly, I've just been trying to get through the day in one piece, with enough energy left over after I get home to throw a couple of loads of laundry in and relax a bit. You could say that I've had a lot on my mind this week. It's 0831 EST5EDT as I write this; twenty-five hours and counting until I go under the drill at the endodontist's office. Needless to say, I'm not looking forward to this procedure by any stretch of the imagination. Generally speaking, I regard trips to the dentist's office as a necessary evil. I don't much like them but if I'm going to keep my teeth for a few more years I'll do whatever I have to do. My bloodline tends not to have very good teeth, genetically speaking. In fact, most people in my family have partial plates by the time they're thirty, and full dentures by the time they're fifty. I'm not looking forward to either of those events by any stretch of the imagination.
Part of it is the discomfort that comes from the drill, period. There's no escaping the sound they make because it's conducted by the bones of the jaw and skull directly to the inner ear, a note so high that I can't place it on the treble clef scale. Dental drills also run at a volume that, while not close to having one's head stuck inside the speaker stack at a Ministry concert, is annoying. I'm not much a fan of that, either.
Then there's the matter of scraping the pulp and root out of the tooth and packing the roots with sealant. That is arguably worse than the drill, because it's so slow and exactly. Rasp.. rasp.. rasp.. scoop... dig... rasp.. rasp.. not with a tiny little bit revolving several thousand times per second but a manual file. Give me the drill any day.
On top of all of that, there's the matter of getting used to yet another dentist. The last one I worked with wound up doing more harm than good to both Lyssa and myself, and in fact she's the reason that I'm in this fix.
The dentist, not Lyssa.
This is a pretty major procedure, and this guy's never done any work on me before, so I think that I've got some reasonable trepidation going on inside at this point in time. Sure, Hasufin vouches for this guy, which does a lot to calm my nerves, but still...
Once more unto the breech, dear friends, once more..