Toothless

The extraction wasn't all that bad. It helps to have a doctor who's not only knowledgeable and experienced but also reassuring as all get-out. I actually asked him at one point during the procedure, "Did you work on that voice or did your friends just tell you 'With a soothing voice like that, you should go into medicine'?" Every time something would go "wrong", he'd calmly explain why this was nothing to worry about and what the next step was.

I thought "resorption" meant that the roots were getting eaten up, but no, it was actually working from the middle in. So the first thing that happened was that the tooth split in half. Then he tried using a corkscrew method to remove the lower half, but the first screw pulled loose and then so did the bigger screw, so he just had to saw the fucker in half. (Apparently another thing that happens with resorption is something called "external replacement" where the lost tooth gets replaced with bone.)

All told, I was in the office for over two hours, long enough for the staff to start joking with me like an established patient. Nevertheless, I felt good enough afterwards that I dropped off my prescription for hydrocodone/paracetamol and went straight to the Anvil to meet up with some folks. A little pocket bear from Baltimore took a shine to me but I set my cap for the tall massage therapist from Boston, who alas only had eyes for the bigger boys. It was all so fun that I stayed a couple hours before heading home to my yoghurt and bedrest.

I didn't actually need the prescription painkiller at all by I'd never had one of these newfangles opiates everyone's going on about so I thought what the hell. I can readily understand the appeal: it wiped all pain away without so much of the wooziness I'd had with codeine when I was a kid (though I was a bit unsteady on my feet). I was hoping for cool Coleridge dreams but they were no weirder than usual.

The worse pain actually came the next night from trying to fit in my appliance, which is like a set of InvisAlign braces with a fake tooth stuck in them. The periodontist warned me that swelling could make them uncomfortable and after wearing them a couple hours at the bar I just wanted to go home despite the fact that I was making good time with a couple of humpy specimens. But between the tooth and my mending anal fissure, I'm probably too much of a mess for new adventures right now anyway.

A hint of winter

Today we have the weather I've been longing for for weeks: cool and grey. What I've really wanted is the kind of slow all-day rain that would excuse sitting inside and reading a good book. We've had thunderstorms, but a downpour simply isn't the same. I almost regret not taking the day off. I could have excused it easily on the basis of my recent surgery and I've got days to burn this month anyway.

I'm not sure what I would have read. Maybe finished Mephisto, maybe taken another stab at Y pla. This was a whim purchase spurred by reading an indifferent short story by Wiliam Owen Roberts which nonetheless prompted me to research him and discover that he was considered something of a Welsh answer to Máirtín Ó Cadhain. A few clicks and I found that one of his novels, about the coming of the Black Death to North Wales, was available for a modest sum, and I ordered it.

Or I also have short story collections (such as the one featuring Roberts) I could dip into instead if I wanted a little less of a challenge. I also have something of a bad conscience about borrowing a book from Uncle Betty early in the year and never getting around to reading it. It's considered a classic in his native country and prominently features his native state but I just haven't felt in the mood to read any Spanish lately.