Welcome to the infirmary

          No more trips for Mamie and me up to the mailbox, or anywhere else for that matter in the near future. This is now a house of rehabilitation and pre-dental care.

Horror in the dentist's chair

You could say last week was a festival for my head: first the ophthalmologist, then the dentist.

Tartar City

Today I rediscovered the truth of the premise that nothing learned is ever really wasted. I had the arms of my chair in a death grip as I breathed in and out, trying to focus on some other body part in an attempt to return to the Lamaze breathing exercises of almost 42 years ago. My dental hygienist Jenn – whom I honestly like when she doesn’t have an implement in her hand – was cleaning my teeth. She was employing that tool of Satan, the waterpik, which shoots sub-arctic water beneath my gums. 

          This would all be perfectly fine if I didn’t have :

1. a pain threshold lower than a nine-day veteran of the Iron Maiden
2. aging gums that have rolled up like 8 pm small-town sidewalks.
3. aging teeth with more cracks than a pre-Civil War house foundation.

By now she knows who she’s dealing with, and bless her heart, she

numbs my entire mouth before approaching me. Still, we have the occasional exciting moment when she hits a live wire in a tooth and I suddenly levitate an inch or two above the chair while water is sprayed liberally over both of us.

          Today while I waited for the next inevitable jolt of pain, I tried to transport my mind somewhere else. This time I not only employed the breathing exercises that brought my now-41 year-old son into the world (deep breath, release slowly, focus on my left knee cap or pinky finger), but I also threw in a few butt clenches and Kegel contractions. 

          I figured I might not have any control over the events in my mouth, but at least I’d come away with a firm derriere and a decreased chance of incontinence.

         

Impaction

  

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            Lillie McFerrin Writes

This week's topic is Wisdom,
something we could all use more of. 



“Billy – come on – we’ve got to get to the doctor’s; I don’t care if Steve Jobs did ask you for that new app of yours.”

Surrounded by monitors, keyboards and assorted electronics, Billy muttered to himself, “Tim Cook, Ma, Tim Cook – Steve Jobs is dead and I will be too if they don’t get this by tomorrow.”

Twenty minutes later, he was in the big padded chair with a mouthful of gauze and a masked man approaching him, a gleaming instrument in his gloved hand.

“We’ll have those wisdom teeth out in no time, Billy.”

That afternoon Billy sat and sipped ginger ale carefully, swished it over the empty spaces in the back of his mouth and stared at the now-unfamiliar figures on the monitor before him.