Children, Fools And The Endodontist

The Prince of Pie nearly torches his own
eyebrows in a fit of birthday-induced joy. His
teeth (pictured, above) would later be subjected
to assaults that no one in their right mind could
smile about.

Greg:

I went to an endodontist for the first time in my life this morning. Now before you Google the word "endodontist", let me just save you some time and tell you what an endodontist does. They fuckin' torture you, that's what.

Check it out. Relive the horror with me. I was referred to an endodontist by my dentist because he couldn't figure out why'n'the shit my teeth still hurt so much after he put a couple of crowns in. That whole deal, the whole grinding-off-the-tops-of-my-teeth deal, launched me into new horizons of candy-colored pain. Tiny demons took ice picks and shotguns to my hurt bone, waking me up every night, driving me to eat Vicodin by the fistful. (I don't know why people eat those things to get high, by the way. All they do is make you feel sick and dumb. I used to get higher than that sucking the sugar coating off of mom's thyroid medication. Sue me! I was a child and they looked just like red M&Ms.) But get this: It turns out there's only so much Vicodin you can eat before it kills you. No really, it's a fact. So the dentist decided that maybe there was some more drilling or nerve pulling or something that they could do to put me out of my misery without the added risk of having me become another sad drug-related statistic.

So I go to the endodontist this morning and what does he do? He takes a cotton ball and freezes the crap out of it with some liquid nitrogen. Then he tells me he's going to press it against my tooth - not the tooth that is still causing me pain, but a completely different tooth to cause me completely new pain. He says, "Raise your left hand when you feel the pain" and then he puts the cotton ball against my tooth. I say, "GAGH!" and flip him off with the middle finger of my left hand. He says, "Good. Okay, we're going to use that as a baseline to compare how painful your crown is." And before I can say, "Baseline - what the hell?", he goes and freezes the crap out of practically every tooth on that side of my jaw. When he gets to the Hurtiest Tooth I Ever Had and presses the little frozen cotton ball against it, it causes an explosion of icy pain in my head along with a completely extemporaneous hallucination of Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" in its entirety (but fast-forwarded). I try to flip him off with every finger on my left hand. He says, "Good."

Long story short, I don't need a root canal. He said I was inflamed. I said damn right. I'm supposed to go back in a month for a follow up. Next time I'm going to ask him if he can use the cooling power of peppermint schnapps instead of that liquid nitrogen stuff.

I don't know why people are afraid of dentists. Dentists are the Sugar Plum Fairy compared to the endodontist. The dentist digs into your teeth and gums. The endodontist digs into your soul.

In other news - my birthday, which started on Wednesday, just wouldn't quit. I got to celebrate it again on Sunday. I was blessed with good company and several more gifts. My collection of the articles of suburban destruction has been added to quite nicely. I got a wheelbarrow, for instance. And not one of the little crappy ones either. One with real oak handles and a big fat tire that you actually have to pump up. I'm telling Teresa that we're throwing away that car of ours and taking the wheelbarrow to work every morning from here on out. Plus I got a corn knife, which if you did not know it, is kinda like a katana for hillbillies. With it I can now easily quarter, cleave twain or cleanly behead any pugnacious sister-cousin or uncle-daddy that gives me guff. It also cuts corn. Or so I am told.

Plus, I got a gift certificate to Hardwick's Hardware (since 1932), the coolest hardware store on the planet. And you should check out what I bought! I got a socket set with every size socket from Mouse's Toilet Bolt to Elephant's Nut Sack (and by that I mean sack of either stainless steel or brass nuts which are overly large and in the possession of an elephant, and not a pachyderm's man parts). It also contains the very rare 25/32nds socket which is only for parts that come from Taiwan. With that fact in hand, I'm taking my 25/32nd socket over to Taiwan and doing some damage. I'm going to loosen everything. Taiwan is going to fall apart when I'm done. You're gonna see thirty million bicycles all dissolve into a pile of loose parts - k-thwank!

And yes, there was PIE. Blueberry pie (pictured, above).

And now this word about toilets: I moved my two dead toilets from the side of the driveway into the back yard so's to stop offending the neighbors. Not that they made a ruckus or anything (the neighbors, not the toilets). I just needed an excuse to show off the pythons by lifting each toilet with one hand. (Don't try this at home. That said, I should not have tried it at my home.) A friend of mine pointed out that the problem with being burly is that it's never a question of if you can lift something one-handed, it's always a question of why you should lift something one-handed when there are things like dollies and forklifts in the world. That's the question you should always ask. Likewise, that is the question that I did not ask before I single-handedly beefed first one then the other six-thousand pound porcelain crapper ten or so yards into my back yard. And even though I did not ask that question, my back has answered for it as usual. My folly created such exquisite pain that I was entertaining the idea of opening my abdominal cavity so I could ice my spine from the inside. I'm okay now, though. My spine is back in tip-top shape and ready for the next foolhardy stunt I have to dish out. As the old saying goes, God looks out for children and fools. Thank God that despite my rather large collection of birthdays I still fit in one of those two categories.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus