The root of the matter

Slight break from my usual pithy, witty commentary. I’ve been rendered completely useless for the past few days due to a dental situation.

The pain started last Wednesday; by the time I determined it wasn’t going to go away on its own and called my dentist on Thursday, the earliest appointment I could get was Monday.

So I spent four days trying—unsuccessfully—to get ahead of the pain. And, although my dentist assured me that the worst was over with the root canal, it turns out she wasn’t entirely accurate. Despite being on painkillers and antibiotics, my jaw is still swollen up, I can’t talk and if someone offered to shoot me now, I’d take them up on that very kind offer.

Seriously—I hadn’t thought I could be in this much pain for this long. I didn’t need so much as an ibuprofen when I got my knees carved up like jack o lanterns a year ago; but let one little tooth go rogue, and I’m a sniveling wimp. A crying, sniveling wimp.

Considering how unproductive this has rendered me, I’m wondering if this is the real explanation for the dinosaurs dying out: it wasn’t a giant meteor attack or ice age. They all needed root canal and couldn’t survive the lack of dentistry.