Well, dear readers, the dental
chickens finally came home to roost for this intrepid typist. I have avoided
going to the dentist since probably 2008 or 2009. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t
have a dental phobia per se. I was the victim of an over-zealous hygienist some
years ago, who scraped my teeth so hard that I couldn’t chew on the right side
of my mouth for almost two years, and couldn’t have anything touch my right
molars in certain areas without shooting pain searing through my entire body.
The thought of anyone scraping my teeth anywhere near those areas was too much
to bear, so I figured I’d just brush twice a day, use Plackers, and hope for
the best. The other day while flossing, I felt something weird on my front
bottom tooth, pulled my lip back, and discovered a completely exposed root. The
gig was up. I needed to see a dentist, stat. I was a total wreck about it, but
the staff at the dental office was very nice. I was trying desperately to act
normal and hide how scared I was, but obviously I failed spectacularly. because
they kept giving each other knowing looks and talking to me very gently, as
though I were a fragile mental patient on the verge of a crackup.
The bottom line is that have to
get a two-part procedure involving unspeakable things that I shan’t go into
here. The first part was last week, and I have Part Two to look forward to this
week. I stupidly decided I’d be fine to go into work after last week’s
procedure, figuring I could just hide out in my office until the numbness wore
off, but they had to pump me up with so much anesthesia that that my mouth
remained numb for five hours, and, it just happened to be one of those
high-drama days in which I kept getting
called by the Information Desk volunteers to come and help with various and sundry
issues involving the public. On top of it, for some reason my right eye was tearing up endlessly, so I was lurching around, slurring, my eye running
indiscriminately, trying to convince the public I was a competent human being
who was able to help them with their problems. I kept getting strange looks from
my co-workers, too. The following day, one of them told me I had looked
half-dead. This week I might just skip the formality altogether and go home
afterwards.
In writing news, I’m doing a
final push on the novel; getting down to the final or semi-final edit. I have a teacher friend who offered to read
it over the summer while she’s off work and help with an outline and a query
letter, so I’m determined to have a polished version for her by June. I’m at
the point where I truly don’t know whether the changes I’m making are helping
or just muddying the whole thing up, so I’m going to have to call it done
pretty soon and release it into the universe. In the meantime, I started
working on a new short story/essay hybrid-type thing that’s coming along okay
but desperately needs a solid narrative arc. And, a heads-up—the anthology
“Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace” is going to be out
next week. It has a few of my poems in it from “The Acme Employee Handbook”. Check
it out!
I know that puns are supposedly
the lowest form of humor, but I don’t give a damn. I think they’re hilarious
and I’m not ashamed to admit it. I came across this the other day and I
laughed, and laughed, and laughed. So
there, humor snobs! (Warning--there is one very inappropriate joke smack in the middle of the clean ones, so don't watch if you're easily offended.)
--Kristen McHenry
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