About getting crowned, and I don't mean on your head like a queen or even a princess

First it's the bad news during your teeth cleaning when the hygienist says, oh what is that? It might be a crack.

And she looks closer and puts the little camera in my mouth and suddenly there is my entire mouth cavity in all its pale pink moistiness on TV in front of everybody.

And she zooms in on the suspicious tooth and runs her little pointy instrument of death and poky torture over it and says, yes you have a crack right there see it?

And after trying not to look at all that mucous membrane grossiness but now I must look and just say, yea.

Because what to Miss Hygenist is just a crack in Number 18 Distel or Buckle or whatever that must be fixed is a future of pain and hurt and several hundred dollars for She Who Must Sit All Uncomfortable In the Dental Chair.

Then Miss Hygienist calls in Dr. Dentist and I'm thinking maybe he is waaay too young to even know what he's talking about and I ought to get up and go somewhere else, somewhere with a nice, old, cheap dentist, but this young one, when my pale pink moistiness is not filling the TV screen, he lets me have the remote and I can watch anything I want to during cleanings and get headphones too. So I guess I'll stay.

So Dr. Too-Young looks up on the screen then down in my mouth with his little mirror of decay detection and says, yep, she's got a crack in Number 18. She needs a crown. Let's get it scheduled.

And right then I am not wanting a crown, but some crack sounds good.

So I make the appointment at a time in the future that seems really far away but I know it's not. It's just long enough for the nice ladies at the front desk to send away for an insurance estimate, and yes, I take time to thank God I have dental insurance, and I get the estimate back and it's four figures, and no the insurance doesn't pay anywhere near that much so I'm wanting that crack again.

But that tooth, when the hygienist touched it with her shiny sharp instrument of death, it did hurt, so I know I better get crowned.

Which I did: After an hour of needles jabbed into my gums, numbing me to the point of drooling, jaws of life keeping my mouth open to the procedure, the high-pitched wail of the drill vibrating my whole head, my mouth filled with fluffy white putty stuff, the pungent airplane-glue-stuff that keeps the temporary crown on, not even CNN's Most Political News In the Morning could keep my mind off my mouth.

I just want to go home--and I can't even to that, because I have to go to work.

Where I sit, numb from lip to ear, tongue to cheek.

Queen Catherine of Novacaine. All hail. Sorry about the drool.