I've Been Thinking About This…

The dentist had given me 3 prescriptions – Vicodin, Tylenol 3 & a very strong antibiotic. Drove over to the usual supermarket pharmacy to get them filled. Man, they take a long time! They said 25 minutes – after 35 minutes they were still going strong. On the plus side, I now know where the men’s room is there.

At home, I heeded the dentist’s warning about the Vicodin, and had a bowlful of tomato soup so as not to take it on an empty stomach. (I also listened to the pharmacist’s warning against taking the Vicodin & Tylenol 3 together.) That’s one slow-acting drug! I thought it was supposed to be hot stuff – I took it at 1:45 and by 2:45 it was only just starting to kick in. After that I switched over to the Tylenol 3 and have been taking that alone.

Following a lunch of soup and pills, I decided to go to bed to see if I could make up for the missed sleep of the previous night. Biff-the-cat checked me out when I got into bed. I remember he used to attack Chloe-the-dog when she got home from the vet, because she smelt all wrong. He was gracious enough not to attack me, however – he just got up close to my mouth to have a detailed examination and assure himself that I was who I claimed to be. After that he walked back and forth over me a few times and then we drifted off into companionable sleep. I should think I slept for perhaps an hour before waking.

By this time I had made the executive decision to have an absolutely self-indulgent couple of days, so I turned on the a/c and watched Jab We Met, a wonderfully mad Bollywood movie, with Kareena Kapoor dancing on location at Manali in the Himalayas – can’t imagine how she was able to do that over a mile above sea-level. Watch her dancing to ‘Yeh Ishq Hai’ (‘This is Love’) here:

That evening I went to bed around 7:30 and slept fitfully. Another day or so should put me right though.

On Wednesday I had bought some hot dogs and buns, and decided to have a couple for lunch. When I munched them down, something felt a little painful, and my tooth stayed sore for a while. By about 3pm the next day, it felt quite sensitive, and I felt a bump under my jaw. My pastor was coming over at 4pm to go over his sermon and have an early dinner so there wasn’t much I could do right then. I figured the lump would go down soon. But by 8pm the swelling had moved from my jaw, pushed up the flesh between jaw and cheek, and was pushing its way upwards on my cheek.

Time to get some outside help – but whence? Was it a tooth thing, or was it something else – should I go to the hospital? I was pretty sure it was my tooth, but would they tell me to get the swelling down before they could do anything? I also remembered that my brother had an abscess when the dentist was working on him, and it got into his bloodstream and he wound up in hospital for a few days. Further: if the dentist, which one? Since I didn’t really have a connection with any dentist, could I go back to the first one – the only one left who’d done any major work on me and whose office was a lot closer, or should I go to the one where my records were, despite the fact that there would be those soaps and game shows blaring at me?

I passed the night pondering these mighty variables. There was no significant pain, but it was uncomfortable nonetheless.

About 7:45am I called Soap Central. I figured they had my most recent records, so there was more of a connection. It turned out to be an inspired decision. I told the woman who answered the phone that I had a crisis-level toothache, and she asked me for more details – which surprised me somewhat, coming from a receptionist. I explained about the abscess, and – far from sending me to the hospital – she said come down for 9am and we’ll start you as soon as the dentist gets in. A most surprisingly authorized receptionist.

When I reached the office around 8:40 all was explained – I had been talking to the dental assistant. I walked in and she called me by name, took me to one of the side rooms and checked things out. Took an X-ray which went straight onto the PC beside me, and in less than 5 minutes had assessed the situation, determined the course of treatment, brought in the equipment needed and was explaining it all to me. (She also arranged to have Pandora stream in classical music rather than soapy games, so for a couple of hours I got the bliss of Mahler and co. Later I re-tuned The Pandorica to build a set around Jo Stafford.)

Clearly the dentist held her intelligence in as high esteem as I immediately had, because he questioned neither her assessment nor her treatment approach. For nearly four hours I was at the center of a sort of professional ballet as the two of them, along with a new student who was shadowing the dentist, multi-tasked me into their regular schedule. It must have been exhausting for them to ramp up the workload like that.

The dentist gave me a couple of jabs. I don’t remember jabs hurting that much! And what’s with this wiggling the needle around once it’s in? Spreading the juice around perhaps? But it didn’t seem to do anything for me. While they were waiting, I tried moving my jaw around a bit, on the theory that the pressure of the abscess was blocking the stuff from working – which was ridiculous, since the anesthetic was never down at that level. The dentist cheerfully agreed with me that that was sure to have helped, then explained that the anesthetic worked best at a neutral ph, and the infection had pushed my ph off-kilter. So he gave me two more jabs that – despite the previous ones – hurt even more. From now on, that needle stays in her hands!

And we were off! First a crown was freed and pulled – that felt weird and crunchy – and then the cracked and broken tooth that caused the most immediate problem was pulled (it seemed to come out fairly easily). Pulling the tooth before draining the abscess concerned me a great deal, in view of my brother’s problem. But in for a penny, I thought – and these folks clearly knew what they were doing. Looked kind of funny in their full-face screens, though. That must be one deadly abscess.

The down-side of the anesthetic, of course, is that you can’t feel the relief as the abscess drains, but that’s a trade-off I’ll live with. One of the things that the assistant had promised early on was that the abscess would be fully drained before they sewed everything back up, and she and the new student worked away to get the stuff out – her hands carefully and gently massaging the swollen areas on my cheek and under the jaw. There was a lot of goop to get out, and a couple of other openings had been made by the dentist – aren’t you enjoying reading about my experiences with pus? – one in the cheek and one in the valley between jaw and cheek. They needed to stay open for a while to drain.

She had just gone out for a while, and the dentist had come in and was sewing up the cavity when she came back in – and I felt that she shifted straight into ‘patient arbiter’ mode. She was very concerned that he was sewing up the cheek already instead of letting it keep draining. Clearly I wasn’t the only one who thought she was ready to jump down his throat, because he hurriedly interrupted her to explain that he was only sewing up the cavity, not the incision. Felt pretty good to have someone in my corner like that.

At around the two-hour mark I started to feel a bit faint. I’m needle- and blood-phobic at the best of times, although it’s never hit in the dentist office before. When I mentioned it to the dentist, he offered water or orange juice. I opted for water at first. I tried putting my head down, but that didn’t seem to work. Then the dentist came back in to see how I was doing, and I thought I’d better go for the OJ after all – I assumed he had it in the refrigerator – that was certainly the impression I got. Turns out he actually sent someone out to get it – no wonder it took so long to get to me! The assistant, meanwhile, draped a wet paper towel over my forehead and that did the trick.

Periodically, the dentist or the assistant would give me a pat on the shoulder as they passed – a sort of ‘You’re doing OK.’ Sometimes touch can be such an encouragement.

As I left, I got a firm and clearly sincere command from the dentist. If there was any problem at all at anytime, weekend or not, call in, get his cell phone off the office machine and contact him immediately.

Hard not to be impressed with MY dentist and his team.

When I was just a wee little lad, maybe 8 or 10 years old, I went to the dentist. I’ve no idea whether it was my first time – I expect not – but I had to get a filling. Evidently the dentist thought it would be best not to have anesthetic – perhaps the work was minimal in his eyes. So he told me that real men don’t need it. I was at that ideal age for dentists – over the age when I wouldn’t tolerate the pain without screaming, and too young to think that I had any say in the matter. I sucked it up, and since then I have never appreciated dentists.

This sad state of affairs continued until I wound up with a dentist locally who took the time to sit down with me, talk everything through, let me understand what was going to happen, and generally treated me like the intelligent person I secretly wished I was. Since I was on a good group plan at the time, it was almost completely free to me (other than the aspirin I needed afterwards from crushing the arm of the dentist’s chair).

Work on the old mouth was almost finished; I was now enormously calm about going to the dentist and proud of my serious laid-back coolth. The needle didn’t bother me overmuch; the drilling I now laughed at. Then the company changed the insurance carrier, and the new carrier wouldn’t take this dentist. So we found me a new dentist who was good enough to be popular, and he seemed pretty good to me too. He’d been in practice for a long time, and things were pretty clockworky there … but he never sat down to talk to me about long-term plans, and he didn’t know the previous dentist’s approach. So I just went there for crisis fixes and to have the dental nazi give me cleanings twice a year.

When he retired he sold his practice, and the new dentist installed TVs over all the chairs. “The first thing we do – let’s kill all the lawyers,” says Shakespeare’s character, but I’d rather reserve that for anyone involved in the propagation of soap operas, game shows and reality shows. During my next cleaning I begged her to turn the stupid thing off. I think she was so grateful I nearly got my cleaning torture for free.

Went with a friend to the Simon & Garfunkel/Billy Joel tribute band concert at the Harwinton Fairgrounds this evening – the Lion’s Club put it on. Living across the road it’s an easy stroll. We packed some food & drink, carried a couple of chairs and sat near the back, watching all the people enjoying themselves: surprising how many people in their 70s were there, along with lots of young families.

Concert at dusk

The Simon & Garfunkel pair were pretty good, but the Billy Joel band was impressive, rolling song into song. Apparently their repertoire consisted of songs from other artists as well, so they ran out of time – I wouldn’t know, being relatively ignorant of BJ’s discography. I know they missed the classics, though: “Just the Way You Are”, “She’s Always a Woman”, “She’s Got a Way”, “Uptown Girl” and “Leave a Tender Moment Alone” would have been nice.

We watched one young family as they left near dusk; dad was pulling a big wheeled ‘trailer’ maybe 4 feet long, piled high with chairs and food and bags of what baby needs – and hooked to the back like an articulated lorry was a little matching two-wheeled trailer with the baby wearing a red snap-and-glo necklace. We enjoyed one older couple nearby swaying and bouncing to the music; someone else had brought a beach ball that got bounced around the crowd back and forth; families played with the babies; mothers danced with their little girls; kids ran all over the place; just a really pleasant time. We thought how nice it was that it was a safe place for them to run around.

The Beach Ball in Flight

Bumped into Bruce, a friend who is a past president of the fairgrounds; he estimated between 2,000 to 3,000 people there this evening. It was perhaps the nicest time I’ve had over there – great music, great food, great weather, great company – good times. (Photographs by Susan.)

• Prism

Great action SciFi short – 8 minutes. Created by amateurs and completely worth a watch…

• “Porcelain Unicorn” – Winner of the Tell it your way competition:



• Sunrise over the moon’s Tycho crater



(From Nasa’s page: “On June 10, 2011, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft angled its orbit 65° to the west, allowing the LRO Camera NACs to capture a dramatic sunrise view of Tycho crater. … Tycho is about 51 miles in diameter. The summit of the central peak is 1.24 miles above the crater floor. The distance from Tycho’s floor to its rim is about 2.92 miles. Tycho crater’s central peak complex, shown here, is about 9.3 miles (15 km) wide, left to right (southeast to northwest in this view).”

I see Polaroid has put out a line of 3-D glasses. Now if you want to see any of the plethora of movies that have been put out that way, you can go to the cinema or rent them without the cheesy glasses.

And hopes that your new year will bring a deepening of your expression of His Grace.

I never liked cats. They’re standoff-ish; independent; cold. They move fast in a preemptive strike and the next thing you know you’ve got a scratch across your cheek. So when my wife said she needed to go back to the pet shop because she forgot to get dog-food, the last thing I was anticipating was a plot by my wife and daughter and an ambush by a half-pound kitten. (Warning number one: she only went to the pet shop in the first place to get dog food; how come she forgot? I ignored that point, rather than question my wife’s mind. It may not have been a good call — I paid for it later.) Into the pet-shop we walked; surrounded by the smells of fish food and happy puppies, I was an innocent being brought to the slaughter. We picked up the dog food.

My daughter said, “Oh, just look at the kittens!”

I said, “They’re Tribbles, and they’re Trouble. Come on, we’ve got the dog food … Chloë’s hungry; let’s go.”

My wife said, “We have time to look at them. We’d like to see that orange one there, please.” (This last to the clerk.) Warning number two: she was too specific, but the bell going off in the back of my mind still wasn’t loud enough. Out came the kitten.

She said, “Just hold it. No, really, it’s purring. Feel how soft it is on your cheek.” She touched the loudly-rumbling kitten to my face — it didn’t lash out and scratch me. (I realize now that the cat was in on the plot as well.) She put the kitten in my hand. The whole of that tiny body lay there, purring enormously, exuding contentment as the tail hung gracefully down. I lifted it back to my face — he reached out and touched me on the nose, paw velveted. It was an amiable gesture; there was an enormous contentment in holding him so. My daughter put up her hand and gently stroked it. (Warning number three: my daughter should have wanted her own kitten to hold at the same time. Went right over my head.)

“How much is he?” my wife asked the clerk.

“Thirty five dollars.” came the reply.

“Honey?”

“No!”

“But Dad, he’s so cute, and small, and all alone!”

“Which part of ‘No’ didn’t you understand?” (But already I was weakening under the onslaught of this insidious purring.)

“Chloë will love him.”

“They’ll fight.”

“He’s a lover, not a fighter!”

“Don’t quote McCartney to me.”

“It was Michael Jackson, and it’s true.”

“Absolutely not. Your mother and I will talk about this, but the answer’s still going to be ‘No’.”

And we left. Yes, it’s true; we walked out of that pet store and drove home. And when my wife was talking, all I could hear was that purring reverberating in my ear. Promises were made about who would look after the cat, change the litter, get the food ready. But when we got to discussing who would name it, and how we’d each get a vote, I realized I had lost. A lifetime of cat-less-ness surrendered to a tiny marmalade Tribble.

We got back into the car and went back to the pet shop. As we walked through the door, somebody else was holding my cat! Thank heavens, she put him back in the cage, and walked out of the store. I went to the counter and put down my thirty-five dollars. As we walked out, the woman was coming in with her husband, saying,

“I forgot to get the dog-food; it won’t take a minute.”

Well, the Biffster caught another mouse yesterday. This doesn’t happen when I’m in the house, for the most part, probably because the mice stay hidden when they hear me wandering around. But sometimes when I’m out, the mice come out to play … and so does Biff.

Once I came home to find 5 of them, lined up in a row in the hallway. One by one I picked them up and carried them away, until I got to the last one. Turns out this one had only been faking death … when I went to pick him up, he leapt up and ran away. Biff gave me – I swear it – a disgusted glance, as if to say, “Pathetic! Can’t do anything right. Couldn’t you smell he was still alive?” And then ran off to catch him all over again. This time Biff made sure he was dead. I apologized to Biff for making him do double work. I was very contrite, and I believe he forgave me in the end – after all, I’m only human.

So last night, I got home and wondered why the door down to the basement was wide open. I was sure I hadn’t left it that way, but there it was. I knew it had to be Biffy, but he had to be running up the stairs from the basement at one heck of a lick! I didn’t really think too much about it at the time, and we went in to watch a season of “As Time Goes By” together, Biff draped along my legs. Then I thought I’d go make myself some hot chocolate and finish my current book – Church Marketing 101 – and saw the mouse behind the door.

So you can see on the sidebar that the meeces count is going up. I’m so proud of that boy.