that is the question…
i went to the dentist yesterday and he was concerned about one tooth with a really really receding gum and made an appointment for me with a periodontist. i had vague memories of some kind of procedure, who knows how long ago, involving cutting skin off the roof of my mouth and sewing it onto some tooth. yeah, they said, this is the kind of thing they would do.
the more i thought about it, the more i decided this had been done on this very same tooth. but when? was it 10 years ago, or 15? doubtful that i could remember 15 years ago, but on the other hand, i doubt i’ll ever forget that sickening feeling, first in having the skin sawed from the roof of my mouth, and secondly, from seeing the little blob of skin there on the guy’s tray.
yuck, is all i say.
but how would i ever figure out when it’d been done? they gave me the choice of three guys to see, and one sounded vaguely familiar. i asked mom and dad, and they both remembered that i had it done, but of course they didn’t know when it was either. i had no idea which dentist i was seeing at the time, whenever that time might have been, so there was nobody to ask.
this morning i had the brilliant idea of looking in a file. we have a great big ugly filing basement down in the basement, and i always suspect it’s 99% full of stuff that needs to be recycled, but i was pretty sure there was a file called “dental.” i looked, and there it was – i had this EXACT SAME PROCEDURE on the EXACT SAME TOOTH done by the EXACT SAME GUY just nine years ago.
hmm. shouldn’t something like this last a little longer? i looked it up online and found one thing that said it should last a lifetime. i only found that one article, though; the rest of them were scientific dental journal kind of stuff that didn’t seem to have any information about how long the dumb things are supposed to last. it seems to me that it should be more than nine years.
who would want to be a dentist, anyway? i know i’ve mentioned this before, but really, who? nobody ever looks forward to going to the dentist. usually there’s pain involved.
i mean, i know that it’s good that we have dentists because otherwise our teeth would probably all rot and fall out, and then we’d only get to eat ice cream and jell-o all the time.
but i continue to wonder what kind of person wants to do that.
meanwhile, i wonder what this periodontist will offer as an explanation as to why the graft didn’t last very long. i saw no money-back guarantee in all the papers i found, nor was there anything about getting it re-done at a discounted rate.
it’s always something.
les spends a lot of time thinking deep thoughts, too.
on sunday morning amy taught her very first zumba class, as she starts her ascent to QUEEN OF ZUMBA.
before that, we had a zumba rehearsal at her house, so that she could make sure she remembered all 14 songs, with all the choreography she’d memorized or made up. that’s a lot of songs.
it was fun because numie and noodle were there to watch, but amy thought they would be scared by the loud music.
they weren’t. clearly, though, they too were deep in thought about many deep thoughts.
sometime i’m pretty sure les is just posing for the camera.
last night he climbed in the sink while i got ready to go out, so of course i had to take a picture of him as he struggled to stay awake.
ok then for friday morning,
mrs. h.