A long week

After my eye operation, I was shut up for a week in a friend's apartment (no stairs) where she made me meals while I lay around trying to keep my head parallel to the floor for fourteen hours a day.  It was exhausting work.  Anyone who has ever had intrusive eye surgery or cared for someone who did knows exactly what I'm talking about.

Apparently I didn't do it well.  Or maybe the operation didn't go well.  It's hard to tell, and it's water under the bridge, it ain't comin' back again.

I listened to The House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne on tape.  I have no idea what went on in that book as characters came and went confusingly over the generations but there was at least one very bad man in it, or perhaps several, and justified revenge was exacted.  To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, which I had read previously a long time ago in ninth grade, went down easier because the action was more straightforward and there was one very good man, or perhaps several, in it although no justice was achieved.

Towards the end of my week in a coma I did take two walks outside for about 20 minutes each, delighting in handling cool packages of cold cuts in a store I stumbled around in for a few minutes.  I tried to use Apple Pay, newly installed in the "wallet" on my new I-phone, to pay for some pasta but I was incapable of successfully negotiating that transaction and paid with cash as the people on line behind me started staring hard at me as the bumbling minute turned into three or four minutes lost forever to all of us.  At the end of the week I went back home for the night, halfway back to the Kaiser Permanente facility in Northern Virginia where the surgery a week before had been performed, so I could present myself the next morning for my one week eye exam.

Back to the dentist, day one

The dental technician was familiar to me from all the trips to the dentist I took in the fall of 2015 when I had over $6,000 worth of dental work done, and she got me seated in the chair and presently the new dentist came in to say hello and assess the situation.  He had read my health condition update and asked about my running, which I said was on hold for the foreseeable future while I healed from an achilles strain.

I noted from reading the plaques on his wall that he had graduated in 2011 from SUNY Buffalo dental school and I told him that I'd traveled to Buffalo several times during my last two years at work for cases and I thought it was a grand old city, although it tended to be a little cold (all my trips seemed to occur in the winter).  I also noted that he'd done his dental internship at a hospital in Syracuse and asked if he'd commuted to there from Buffalo or moved there, because it seemed to me that it was hours away.  He said he had moved there for his internship and it sounded like pretty interesting stuff--being on call at the emergency room and being brought in to treat smashed teeth from fights or teeth driven into the jaw or cheekbone from a car wreck.

That was an education, he told me, and he got a faraway, nostalgic look on his face as he thought about (not so) old times dealing with true emergencies.  I didn't know dentists did internships in hospitals because I never imagined hospitals dealt with acute dental problems but if you think about it, they must see terrible dental mishaps lots of times that they're not equipped to handle.  The ER doctors might save your life, but not your teeth.

And now the good doctor was ready to deal with reinserting an old but intact crown and that didn't seem like it was going to be interesting, challenging or hard for him, not like in the olden days when he saw teeth displaced by force and driven into strange places.  The good news was that we were already on a first name basis, Nick and Pete, but the bad news was that about four hours of being in the chair spread out over three days in the next fortnight was only getting started.