All the Wasted Time

And to think, I could have been smoking meth all this time.

All these years, the pull of crack and meth was strong, but the one thing that deterred me was that old thing they tell you about how your teeth fall out.

If I'd known that my teeth would just pop the fuck out of my mouth all on their own, I'd have picked up the pipe long ago.

So... You all might recall my previous post about my issues with my dentist (the aptly named "Crotchety Bastard" and my teeth.  It seems that despite all of the work the old coot put in on my one problem tooth, that low and behold he fucked it up, and suddenly... without pain or warning, my one-year-old crown just decided to rebel from my jaw and fling itself free from my mouth altogether.

Now, I don't mean to be all dramatic and whatnot, but let me just tell you that there is nothing quite so jarring as your teeth falling out with no inkling ahead of time. I think I'd prefer to be in a knife fight. At least that's a voluntary violation.

So there I was last week, getting settled in at work, when my crown pops the fuck out. I call the Old Crotchety Bastard to make an emergency appointment, and in what may turn out to be the most fortuitous happenstance of all, I come to find out that the OCB doesn't take my new employer's insurance. Glory-fucking-hallelujah. Finally, I have an excuse to leave that old mother fucking crotchety bastard.

Here’s where I find that almost everyone else on the planet freaking LOVES their dentist. I posted about my dental despair on Facebook, and got a dozen dentist recommendations within 2 hours. It was amazing.

I decided, after long and careful thought, to go with the TM’s dentist. Partly because she’s got no complaints. Partly because he had an appointment miraculously open THAT DAY, and partly because he DOES take my new insurance.

All that decided, off I head to my new tooth-man, with my old crown clickety-clacking around in a disposable condiment container, because I’m nothing if not classy. I could do nothing but keep my fingers crossed that the new guy wasn’t also some shriveled old coot with nothing better to do than to mouth-violate me.

Things started off promisingly enough… As I entered the office, I noted that his examining room was festooned. Not with the candid shots of the recently empained, but rather with framed news articles, autographed photos, and other commemorative material surrounding my beloved Cincinnati Reds. “This…”, I though to myself, “…is a good sign.”

I won’t accuse my new guy of a good bedside manner, because that would be false. He’s a younger guy, and tall and stocky, much like your very own Beefy Muchacho. He took a cursory look at the tooth in the plastic container, and then an even more cursory look at the gaping chasm in my mouth where said tooth once resided, and he said…

“You just got this put in a year ago?”

(Oh… I should pause here to mention that my new dentist sort of talks like Shaquille O’Neal does in interviews. All low resonance, and fast words, and hard to make out at first. So, picture Shaq saying this stuff to me while you’re reading. I have to admit that I found the notion that for the first time, the guy with the fingers in his mouth was the one who was easier to understand. )

Back to the conversation….

I replied, “Yeah, almost exactly.”

“Who? I mean… Who did this?”… I could sense the disgust in his voice. His deep, mumbly voice…

“Dr. Crotchety Coot Bastard, DDS… up in Coot Land.” (I’m paraphrasing here. )

“I don’t understand why… He should have known this would never last. I am surprised it lasted this long.

They don’t do it this way any more, because it just doesn’t last.”

This was, obviously, not what I wanted to hear… I really didn’t want to know that not only did the Old Crotchety Bastard have a less-than-light touch when it came to literally everything, he was using fucking antiques on me. Like… apparently just for fucking fun.

What would he have done with me had I stayed his patient forever? Would he have started shoving tooth-shaped pebbles into my mouth? Would he have asked me to pick up a good whittlin’ stick on the way over to his office, so he could “Carve me a chopper?”

Or maybe he’d go the other way, and just be all:

“You know, son… We seem to be having considerable trouble with this one tooth. I say we just yank-em all out. I’ve already got you fitted for the George Washington 5000 model dentures… Now lean back and listen all about how Mitt and I are old fishin’ buddies. This is gonna hurt!”

In about 10 seconds, my new dentist, who I’m going to call “The Big Orthodontal” or “The Big O” in honor of his Shaq tendencies, was able to tell me that The Old Coot had fitted me with a fucking bygone era war button or something, and now the real man was going to fix me all up. Only… it’s gonna take a few weeks to hear from my insurance company to see if they’ll cover the implant he’s gotta put into my jaw.

In the meantime, The Big O's plan was to just stick the old musket ball back into my mouth as a place holder. As he was reading the area, he kept making these mentions about how I need to be careful with it, or I could possibly knock it out in my sleep and choke on it.

As I was thinking about how I could possibly avoid doing something in my sleep, (especially after I asked him if I could use a bite guard, and he said no…), he took one final look at the bit of triceratops bone the Old Coot carved out for me, he tossed the idea and told me to just go Santorum (Toothless) while we waited.  There’s just too much risk that I could lose that fucking crown down my throat. Or, you know…  choke to death. Apparently in that order.

So, here I am. A toothless, grinning idiot. A yokel. And I have no crack., and this is pissing me off. 

More to come... I'm sure. 

Tooth Dust

(I regret initially searching on Google Images for "Fist in the Mouth". Some things can never be unseen.)

Does everyone remember how when you were a little kid there were these things you looked forward to for weeks.

Christmas morning. The last day of school. The next Disney movie (um... still.)

None of these, however, could ever take top the sheer thrill and exhilaration of your biannual trip to the dentist.

That crotchety old son of a bitch.

That's why last Tuesday was so fucking special. I had the rare chance to make my second dentist visit in just under a month. How amazing is that?! It was my fifth visit in 10 months!

You see.... almost a year ago I went in to see good old Crotchety Bastard ("C.B." for short) because my face was in this excruciating pain. It felt like I was sucking on a hot coal as though it were a god damned lolly. Turns out that I had a particularly nasty cavity. I subsequently made 2 more trips to the old C.B. One trip to get a "medicated temporary filling" and then a trip out to the other, more specialized and slightly richer and less crotchety Bastard number two, who gave me a root canal

Damn was that fun. There's nothing like being in the dentist's chair, face numbed to the point of stupidity, and having them get their little pointy hooky things inside from crevice of tooth and start yanking like they're starting a tiny lawn mower.

So anyway, after the root canal, the other, more specialized and slightly richer and less crotchety bastard number two gave me another filling, and said no more. I assumed this was it.

Until a couple of weeks ago, when I was biting down on a piece of soft, chewy pizza and the whole fucking tooth broke off. Like.. snapped at the stem. It's hard to really describe how upsetting it is when your tooth breaks off while not participating in a rock-chewing competition or some bare knuckle brawl, but rather eating a soft and innocuous piece of glorified bread. I can tell you that it was not cool at all. AT. ALL.

So I go back to C.B's office and he's all...

"You never came back for your permanent filling. "

and I'm all...

"What the eff are you talking about you Crotchety old Bastard?" (paraphrasing)

Turns out that filling the other, more specialized and slightly richer and less crotchety bastard number two gave me was ALSO supposed to be temporary and I was supposed to come back for yet another visit to the C.Bs office to get a permanent filling put in. Did anyone tell me this? No. No they did not.

So, the CB give's me some shit about being a bad dental patient and whatnot, because I was supposed to read their fucking minds or whatever, and gives me another "temporary medicated filling", and tells me to come back in a couple of weeks, because, lucky me... I get to have a crown.

That brings us to last Tuesday.

So I go back to the CBs office once again, and the first thing he does is stick me right in the mouth with some sort of numbing agent. My favorite part of this is that every time he does it (I've had it done enough in the past year that I actually have picked up patterns), he goes "Eaassy. Eaaaasy." Like I'm a god damned wild horse or something that needs to be tamed. Then he stabs me in the mouth.

So I'm getting good and numbed up, and I bust out my Anti-Dentists balm (aka: Carmex) and I give my lips a good lathering. Apparently I have a hard time keeping my mouth open wide enough, so I'm always getting yanked around, and getting my lips cracked and bloody and whatnot. It's not a fun time. So I come prepared with loads of lip balm and moisturizing stuff.

Anyway, I lather on a good amount of it, and go back to reading Entertainment Weekly. The dentist always seems to be seeing multiple patients at once, so I typically come prepared to wait in between. The strangest thing about it is that he doesn't have full walls in his office between examining areas, so you can hear everything going on in the other rooms. I can only imagine what horrors some child would feel while hearing my teeth get ground and drilled.

So, finally the CB comes back and immediately grabs my mouth like an angler grabbing a scrod.

Then he proceeds to violate my mouth.

The exact details of events are a little unclear, I have to be honest. I think it's a defense mechanism. There are three things that DO stand out.

1) At one point, he has his index finger hooked in the corner of my mouth like fucking Bass-Masters or something, and he keeps having these incidental conversations with other people while absentmindedly keeping his finger hooked in there. It was totally insane. By the time he was through, I had a deep gash in the corner of my mouth, and my lips were red with blood again. All of the Carmex in the world couldn't have saved my mouth from the fish hook.

2) Toward the end of the ordeal, the dentist was shoving a huge amount of this pasty stuff that eventually dries to become a filling, and after he sort of shapes it down, he has the tech-lady shine this blue light in my mouth. I don't have a funny story about that. I just thought it was weird.

3) The last thing the CB did was shave down my (now filled) tooth. There's something incredibly unpleasant about the sight, sound, and smell of having your tooth ground down. I generally keep my eyes closed during the dental procedures, as it helps me stay relaxed. Generally, I don't want to know what's happening to me. This time, I made the mistake of opening my eyes as he was grinding my mouth with a glorified Dremel tool, and I see a cloud above my head. Tooth dust. There was a fucking cloud of my TOOTH flying around the air. I took a sharp breath. I couldn't help it. This was a mistake. I breathed in a lung-load of my own tooth. The realization hit me, and I immediately breathed out again. I had a cloud of own, aspirated tooth dust coming out of my mouth like a sicko dragon.

I have another appointment on Tuesday.

After the Break

I slept late this morning, and now I'm all wired. And bored. The Tofu Muchacha is slumbering peacefully, having earned a solid rest after a day of running (10 miles!) and rehearsal. I accidentally deleted "Ultimate Recipe Showdown" before I watched it. The Cardinals/Brewers game is quietly in hand. I'm bored.

As I waited through the commercials, a couple of them struck me, so I've decided to write a short post about some of my issues with the growing weirdness of television advertising.

Screaming. Two of Three commercials featured men screaming. Staples is currently running these crazy ads where this idiotic business man is standing in the aisle of the store and just absolutely insanely shouts "WOW!! That's a low price!". Then he repeats this several more times as he sees all of the low prices the store offers. It's utterly ridiculous. The other screaming man commercial features George Takei. 'Nuff said.

How is having a man scream like a crazy person suddenly something that would make me think your product is good? I've been blown away by some low prices in my time (though, to be fair, never at Staples), and I've never felt the urge to scream like Howard Dean at a Prince concert.

Sand. I don't understand what it is about the beach that 1) makes people suddenly feel sexy like in those Cialis commercials or 2) makes ladies feel like their period is going better like in just about every tampon commercial. Sand isn't sexy. In fact, I am struggling to think of more than two or three things LESS sexy than sand. It gets in your crevices. It's used to grind things down. That really is all you should know about sand before determining you don't want it incorporated into your love making. And yet... Cialis will have you believe that when you take their magical pill you'll want to be transported right down onto the closest sandy beach for your middle-aged love making. I really enjoyed the Kotex commercial where the girl was all sarcastic about how the first thing she wants to do during her period is run around on the beach. At least they're aware of how stupid most tampon commercials can be.

Shame. Did you know that Infinity is currently running an ad campaign for one of their cars that brags the interior has silver dust polished into the wood. SILVER DUST. Like, first of all... how is this even remotely reasonable? Not to rip off a David Cross bit, but THIS is why most of the world hates us. Our fancy cars aren't fancy enough. We have to rub precious metals into the wood grain. Does it make our car run better? Does it conserve fuel? Does it smell like springtime? No. It's just a completely retarded thing. It's rare that I'm offended by oppulence (I mean... I work for a private jet company.) This isn't in the league of the 300,000 dollar watch that doesn't tell time, but it does make me think of it.

While I'm on the subject... Is it just accepted at this point that functionality is no longer the primary selling point in a product. I'm pretty convinced that something doesn't even have to work at all if it looks cool or has diamonds buried in it, or it smells like poppies or whatever. Moen wants you to buy their faucets because they look nice. Volkswagen wants you to buy their cars because they no longer look like toasters. Of course, Honda wants you to buy their cars because they DO look like toasters, so I don't know what to think.

The one thing I'm absolutely positive about is they don't even have to talk about how well their products work. This is amazing to me.

I've managed to blog myself into sleepiness. I leave you with one final thought...

DVRs are wonderful things.

This blog brought to you by the new Nike Air Muchachos
Oh yes. Those are real.

Me Eye! Me Eye!

Way back in the long-ago month of January I developed this.... thing. Right on my eye. Well, on the lower right eyelid. It started out as this small little bump. Not painful. Not annoying. Hardly even noticeable, really. I showed it to some various folks and I got a bunch of different home-doctor diagnoses...

"It's a stye. You should rub some silver on it."

"It's a eyelid zit. It'll go away."

"It's an ingrown hair."

Well... I didn't try silver. I didn't really do anything. I just stopped wearing contacts, started wearing my glasses for the first time since I was 16, and went about my business. I went to San Antonio. I did a show. I went to Denver.

Progressively, the "thing" got worse. It went from being barely noticeable, looking more like an irritation than anything else, to being this bulbous, throbbing pustule. It was so bad at one point that my boss asked if it was obscuring my vision. He wasn't kidding at all.

In late February I decided I was tired of looking at it, and went to the doctor. He took about .5 seconds to diagnose me as having a Chalazion, not a stye. You can see the difference by clicking on the link. The comforting thing was that he seemed less than concerned, and gave me a 2 week cycle of tetracycline and told me it would just go away....

It did not.

In fact, during the week in Denver, it got significantly worse, going so far as to crack and bleed a little. It annoyed me enough, and grossed out my hosts enough, to prompt me to schedule another appointment with the doctor.

I went on Monday, and in another .5 seconds he was all "Yep... that's gonna have to be lanced."

I was all about it, and basically leaned back and started swabbing the area my own self, but he just sort of chuckled and said "Oh... in the old days I would have been able to do that for you, but nowadays there are specialists. You'll have to schedule in with one of them."

Sigh...

So I did. For yesterday at 8 AM.

Let me tell you a little about my experience.

I got to the office (an hour North of home and an hour and a half north of work) and they get me back almost immediately. I barely had a chance to read about all of those CRAZY INVENTIONS in Readers Digest. (Someday I'm going to have to write a post about Readers Digest, because that is one magazine I don't fucking get.) Anyway, they take me back to the first room where they (for the 3rd time in 6 weeks) test my eyesight. Even if I couldn't see it, by now I know what the line says. Then some random doctor comes in and looks at the fucking thing AGAIN, and lo-and-behold, much to my surprise, agrees that the GIANT EFFING BLOB on my eye needs to be removed. Then she goes away. That was weird to me, because she didn't actually do anything at all. She just agreed with Doctor #1 and left.

After a little bit, I finally meet this "Specialist" who I will say was very, very nice. He comes in and is all asking me about my job and talking to me about the weather and all kinds of random shit. As he's chit-chatting away, he leans me back in this chair and swabs around the thing. Then, casual as can be, he says.... "Okay. I'm going to give you some numbing medication so that we can perform the procedure. You'll feel a little pinch."

Then he proceeds to stab my eye with a big effing needle. Four times. To call it a "little pinch" is a little like calling getting your ballsack caught in your zipper a "little pinch". Not to be crude about it, but that bitch HURT. The 4th of 4 needs went literally right into the corner of my eye. The whole time he's all "oooh.. sorry... sorry... What kind of people do you fly?"

If the guy weren't so damned friendly about the whole thing I may have wanted to murder him.

So then he gives me a swab of gauze and tells me to hold it on there for a minute or so before removing it. I do, and when I remove it, I see one of those things that is probably harmless and normal, but really freaks you the hell out. The gauze is just SOAKED with blood. Like someone had shot me. That didn't make my tummy flies stop their fluttering, that's for sure. I'm not squeamish about blood, and I'm not really a baby when it comes to pain, but something about bleeding from my eye got to me.

So after a while, my eye did start to numb-up something fierce. It was kind of an odd feeling, because the numbness was extremely localized. The top lid was totally fine, and the space just below the lid was fine. When I blinked, it felt like my upper lid would just fall into an abyss.

They walked me into the "Minor" room, where they perform minor procedures, and sat me down in the chair. I made the terrible, terrible mistake of looking to my right where the "tools" of my little "minor" surgery were waiting. Tongs. Q-Tips. X-Acto. I wish I were joking. I should NEVER have looked at that.

So Friendly Doctor walks in again and is still chit-chatting away, and he leans me back again and grabs on to my lid with the aforementioned tongs. I close my eyes. Then I hear the worse sound I've ever heard. The sound of an x-acto blade cutting my eyelid open. I could FUCKING HEAR IT. It was nauseating. Sadly, it got worse.

After he sliced me open like a dude at a gang initiation, I felt this weird pressure. Not unlike the pressure I felt after my surgery when the doctor pulled the drainage tube out of my chest. Not pain, but something possibly worse than pain. Just a gross, icky pressure.

Oh... and whatever it is that he's doing (I can't feel it specifically enough to figure it out) is rocking my whole head from side to side. I can also feel the pressure change intensity. I realized what it was after about a minute. He was scooping around in my open eyelid cavity with the damned Q-tip.

This went on for 10 minutes if it was a second. At one point I felt so close to vomiting from the sickening movement of the whole thing that I took a deep inhalation of breath. This actually caused him to interrupt his delightful conversation with the nurse about what her son's plans for Spring Break were. He was all "You alright?"

I was all.. "*gulp* yeah... just feel a good deal of pressure *gulp*".

"Yeah...you'll get that. If you start feeling pain, let me know. We can fix that. "

My brain shot to the needle in my eye and I shut my damned mouth. Soon enough he finishes up, and gives me an ointment, and shakes my hand and sends me on my way.

Overall, not so bad really.

I have 2 favorite moments from the experience.

1) As I'm immediately making my 90 minute drive from there to my office, I offhandedly look in the rear view mirror. Blood is streaming down my face, like I'm one of those creepy statues of the Virgin Mary.

2) I went to a gathering of theatre folks last night, and my buddy Nate seriously tells me "Your eye's looking better." I've thought a lot about this comment, and have come to the conclusion that the "thing" that haunted my poor right eye for 2 months must have been pretty fucking bad, because here's what my eye looked like last night:

Oh... one last thing... I was most disappointed that I didn't get to wear an eye-patch. Even just for a day.