Feeling Fine

My tooth has grown wings and flown to heaven, thanks to this afternoon's root canal accomplished neatly by my new dentist.  She loaded me with just enough Kickapoo Joy Juice to nullify the nerve without further consequence, compared to the previous toothmonger who would pound in enough prilocaine to kill seven cats and leave me drooling because the mouth forgot how to close.  It wasn't pretty.  After one of his  forays into local anesthesia I went shopping, unaware that half the lip was dragging behind me, trying to catch up.  I temporarily tucked it into a front pocket, where it had a nap for the rest of the day.  I couldn't say hard consonants for the remainder of the week.  Good bye, Dr. Stabby.

You sometimes don't know how bad things are because you just get used to them; the new dentist seems to be a charm, and I am happy because I was able to eat supper without half of it falling in my lap due to residual mouthflop.  The procedure went well, and seems to have solved the problem.   It's the small things.  Like food staying in your mouth.

I am at the point where most of my doctors are younger than me, and this is a good thing, for they will be around when I need them the most.  When I was younger than my doctors, they would come to the house with a large black satchel full of stethoscopes and wooden tongue depressors.  I had the measles, and Dr. Constantine prescribed darkened rooms, St. Joseph's aspirin, and vitamins; he was a kind man and gave me a sucker.  Once I swallowed a glass bead.

My Grandmother had given me a blue glass bead, faceted and fascinating to me, as I wasn't allowed to have too many girl things.  Nothing fancy here, move along.  It was the Disney years, and I pretended to be an oak tree that chipmunks Chip 'n Dale were storing acorns in.  Oh look, here's an acorn (the bead), put it in the tree (my mouth); take it out, oh, here's another (the same bead), put it in, take it out.  Chipmunk excitement became so frantic that my Neverland brain signaled the top end of the digestive system to *swallow* and boink!  It was down the hatch.

I ran to Mom, who went into emergency crisis mode--she shook me upside down by my legs once when she thought I was choking--and called my eternally angry father who snarled the car home from work in the city out to where we lived in Clarence, New York, and got me in to see the local doctor before the glass bead cut my stomach to shreds or lodged in my appendix.  The doctor was amused, told my parents to feed me bread and lots of water, and five dollars please.  Mom and Dad were hoping for X-rays and surgery, and this man told them bread?  We stopped for a loaf of Wonder on the way home, and I got the sticker of Jiminy Cricket that was on the end of the cellophane wrapper.  "Don't you ever..", I heard for days.  I haven't, but still have a few decades to go.

Quiet night, animals are settled, me too.  It was a fast day.  Cup of tea, moon in first quarter.  Sleep well.