Dear Fellow Readers,

There comes time in life where you celebrate events; the birth of your first child, finally graduating from college, the firing of your boss. At the same time, with celebrations a part of life, there is also a time for mourning.

I, fellow reader, am mourning a loss.

My dear friend

I have a good set of teeth. I’ve always been proud of that, except for four filled cavities, I’ve had a great smile naturally. No braces, no bridges, nothing but Mother Nature’s blessing.

Then my tooth cracked.

Luckily, it was a molar. Not just any molar though, a wisdom tooth. I debated for some time as to whether I should have work done or not. See, like most people, I’m…um…chicken shit when it comes to the dentist.

Eventually, I saw my local dentist. Greta Von Yankem, I thikn her name is. In her broken English accent, hinted with a not-so-slight pinch of German, she told me it had to go. Full extraction. A simple 15-minute job, she told me.

“You vont feel a teeng,” she said.

A week (actually, three months) later, I went back to her. After plunging my jaw with three shots of novacain, she grabbed what looked like a screwdriver and tried to loosen good old #32. Her nurse, Victor, kept that suction crap in my jaw and handed her various other tools of death, like a wrench. She tugged, twisted, and finally pulled out what was left.

Or so I thought.

She looked back and saw the other half of the tooth still there, so she went at it again. It was like David versus Goliath, except there was no slingshot, giant, or midget. Round two ended in a knockout - she successfully pulled out the rest of my tooth.

Then she decided to show me. I thought I was looking through the prop set of a horror movie. After I woke up ( I didn’t “faint”, I chose to lose conciousness) I grabbed my prescription and left.

So now I have a space where #32 was, and the rest of my teeth have joined a union to prevent this from happening again.