Yay! I don’t need a root canal!
For the last two weeks, I’ve had a nagging pain which I thought was a
toothache. It wasn’t very serious, more of a dull ache in the background, but serious enough to make me seriously concerned. I was planning on going in for a checkup, but the pain was getting worse and worse, and I finally went in for a check up today.
Lesson number one in the mind’s powers of
self delusion: If you believe strongly enough, you can make it happen. This is how
voodoo works – if the victim believes they are going to die as a result of a curse, then they end up making themselves expire out of sheer
faith. And if you take it to the extreme of scientific imaginings, you have the humans in
The Culture novels of
Iain M. Banks (I was reading
Excession in the
dentist’s lobby), humans who after millennia of genetic manipulation have near total control over their own bodies, down to the cellular level. So my mind was imaging all kinds of nasty things - cavities, abscesses, the whirring sound of dental drills, root canals, exploding teeth – and I worked myself up into a general state of
paranoia.
In any case, over the last week I have been miserable and acted like a general
asshole. The toothache, the paranoia, soreness of overdoing it at
racquetball, the chaos at work, the tasks piling up which I’ve procrastinated, and a growing cold all contributed to my overall shitty well-being. Now it turns out that it was all about the cold. It seems my teeth, other than being overdue for a good scrubbing, are
a-ok. It wasn’t a toothache after all, but some serious
sinus pain. The pain’s still there, but it just seemed to melt away at the good news.
So I feel a hell of a lot better, and to celebrate I bought a new shirt on the way home. That and some
Tylenol sinus medication. This pain is still a pain, so this weekend I’m not going to push it. Noding, drugs, and sleep, not necessarily in that order.
Today’s
Poetry In Motion at poetry.com:
weed-grown
Indians remember
rotted
poplars and
along
juniper fences
pirates chortle crossing delicious stumps
found between nettles
There I wept