Go every six months!

Well, I have been home now from Peachland for nearly a week and I haven't written anything about anything. I think I am overdue to write.

While I was away, one of my teeth that my dentist had filled was giving me trouble. Actually two of them were giving me trouble, but definitely one more than the other. While one was getting better the other one seemed to be getting worse. It was my upper right wisdom tooth. I couldn't bite down on it so chewing on that side of my mouth was difficult and then it would just start to ache and the pain would spread into my jaw and up into my head. I was avoiding taking painkillers because I wanted to be able to drink so I was finding tricky ways to deal with the pain.

I found something that worked 90% of the time and it was the most fascinating trick I've ever done. It is from The Course in Miracles and while I haven't actually read or studied the Course yet, my mom has told me about this part of it. I don't quite understand it but I like it and it worked for me. The philosophy is that nothing is real. Your body, the furniture around you, everything really...none of it is real. (it's very matrixy). If your body isn't real then any pain you 'think' you feel isn't real either.

Like I said, I don't quite understand it but I like it so I tested it out. When my tooth started to ache I would say to myself, "This pain isn't real. I have no need for this pain." and seriously 9 times out of 10, the pain would be gone by the time I finished the sentence. I can't explain why it worked but it did. Maybe because I really believed it would work.

On the drive home from Peachland though, this trick wasn't working at all for me. No matter how hard I believed in it or how many times I repeated it, the pain wouldn't go away.

I had an appointment to see my dentist on Tuesday. I walked in and told my dentist to pull my wisdom tooth out. She did a few things to make sure I knew what I was talking about and then got down to business. The entire extraction took 30 seconds and then it was over. She plunked my tooth into a dixie cup and sat staring at it for as long as it took to pull out and then said "Well, that's one for science." Which is exactly where it is now. We donated it to the UBC dentistry department. She then proceeded to do a root canal on the other side of my mouth.

I have spent too much of August in a dentist's chair. I hadn't been in 12 years and I am catching up in the three weeks I've been off work. It turns out that 12 years of dentistry work in 3 weeks might be too much. But really, I am happy to have gotten it done and not have spread it out over a longer period of time. I still have one more appointment in three weeks. I would have gone sooner but we had to give time for the extraction site to heal, which it seems to be doing nicely.

I am committing now to going to the dentist every six months for the rest of my life. I'd like to have all my teeth forever and I'd like them to be strong and healthy. I never want to have spend another month making up for so much.