novapsyche | (no subject)

Eating a Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal bar, I feel something smooth in my mouth.

Immediately I know it's a piece of tooth. I've had experience with this before. I take a look at the piece in shock--the size of it. I feel around to the usual culprit, the tooth that's been dying for years--did that little part left finally break off? No. So it's something else.

I go to the bathroom and look at my bottom teeth. They're all fine. So it must be one on--my tongue feels it. Oh, yeah. That one. The one that cracked last winter when I was eating a cold lozenge.

I go back to my desk and ponder the piece of tooth. The area where it came from feels rough; my tongue can't help but run across it. I take a breath and look up dentists near my home. I call one, ask if they handled emergencies; they have an appointment free in twenty minutes. Okay.

I pack up shop at work and then proceed to wind around Ypsilanti for twenty minutes trying to find this little bitty office. Man, I hate one-way streets. And there's construction everywhere. Jesus. Finally I find this house-looking office and apologize for being late.

The doctor of dentistry is very personable, very nice. You don't see many black dentists, but this is Ypsilanti, so I'm not terribly surprised. He X-rays the tooth (twice, actually, because the first film didn't come out; personally, I don't like a lot of X-rays right near my brain) and he shows me diagrams about fillings and such. He says that in general I have excellent teeth. I don't know if he actually looked in this mouth of mine.

So, we chat for a while, and I tell him about the other teeth I'm worried about and if we should make another appointment. As it's so close to closing time, and since I don't really have an emergency, we decide to just make a new appointment where he can do a full X-ray and put in the new filling. So that's Wednesday. In the meantime, I'm out of an hour of work and down the cost of this extremely short visit, a swing of about $100. This may not seem like much, but I'm so close to the poverty line, it's not funny.

So, now that this has come up, I won't be getting my car looked at for another couple of weeks. I have insurance to pay next week, plus half of my rent. Hopefully the car can handle the meantime.