Relief

My dentist’s office windows are slightly below street level and there’s a tallish brick wall between office and street. On a nice sunny day like today, all I can see of the people strolling down the sidewalk are their heads, rolling along the wall. Puts me in mind, in a nice way, of guillotines and overflowing baskets during the French revolution.

It’s a tad mesmerizing, a good thing, as I was there to have a painful back tooth extracted from the jaw that NEVER gets numb. Fortunately, I have a great dentist (with tiny fingers), who knows just how to jolly me along until the corner of my mouth droops and she can get to work.

So, tooth is gone, she showed it to me in all its cracked and gory glory, and assured me that removal was absolutely the correct decision. She’d given me a choice between spending $4,500 to visit a specialist and see if the tooth could be saved, or spending $220 to yank the sucker out. No brainer, that. Still, it’s nice to know that my frugal ways resulted in euthanasia, not murder.

I mentioned last night’s laugh fest and how the pain completely and mystifyingly disappeared when I laughed. She nodded. “Natural endorphins, best painkillers in the world. You can get them from laughing hard, or from sex. Personally, I recommend laughing. It lasts longer.”

Good to know.

 

Ouch again

Addendum to my post last night: Laughter is a great alleviator of pain…but it’s relatively short-lived.

I hope the dentist has enough chisels.

The power of laughter…and Ted Sawyer

I will never again sniff at all those perky little “power of laughter over pain” people. By golly (or in my case, by gum), it works.

Earlier tonight I was having trouble seeing over the knot of pain in my jaw caused by an infected tooth. I came yay-close to bagging the evening’s entertainment–Robyn had snagged tickets to a play in the Pearl–and thought of just going home to sob in my pillow.

In the end, I couldn’t figure out a way to decline without sounding whiny. We ate a fast dinner at Life of Riley, distinguished for slow service, salty so-so food and rather large checks, considering it was happy hour. Not really worth reviewing.

Then we scooted over to the Armory building, to the Portland Center Stage, and saw “Little Dog Laughed.” Fifteen minutes into the first act I was laughing so hard that it took another 15 minutes before I realized that I was pain-free for the first time in four days.

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Ouch

Ordinarily I’d be the last person to volunteer for dental demolition derby, but the way I feel now I’m about to clean out the hammers and chisels at Home Depot and bring ‘em to my dentist, in case she runs out.

My back molar cracked a couple of weeks ago; the dentist gave me this fluoride varnish stuff (really–fluoride varnish) to paint on the crack, told me to stop chewing popcorn kernels and jujubes. Then she scheduled me for an extraction in a couple of weeks, i.e., this Friday.

The varnish worked miracles; the pain stopped. On Monday my teeth felt so good that I decided to postpone the extraction until August, when hopefully the rest of my life will have settled down to a dull roar.

The tooth gods heard me, frowned, and about ten minutes later my cracked tooth met an unexpected bit of bone in a leftover steak. My eyes crossed in pain and they’ve pretty much stayed crossed for the last four days.

It’s amazing how an exquisitely sore tooth concentrates your entire focus on one small point in your lower right jaw. The dentist suggested Vicodin, but when we tried it two weeks ago, at the beginning of this little adventure, my colleagues eventually found me prone on the bathroom floor, throwing up while trying to faint. Apparently Vicodin and I don’t get along.

So I’m taking this concoction of steroids and uppers designed to reduce the inflammation and therefore the pain. It sorta works, until I move my jaw or try to enunciate a word. Or drink. Or eat. Or smile.

Or, in the last hour or so, breathe.

Thankfully, tomorrow at 3pm I will be ensconced in my dentist’s chair, proffering chisels and hammers and pliers and reciprocating saws as needed. Anything to get this horrid little ball of agony out of my mouth.

Wish me luck.

Process, art and labels

If you ran into me at the Portland Art Museum on GAS conference opening night, you would have seen me sporting a T-shirt admonishing glassists who use the term “warmglass” to describe “kilnforming.” (Incredibly nice-looking T-shirt, BTW, so many thanks to Ted for sending one my way)

The T-shirt went with the really wonderful Klaus Moje retrospective at the museum, one of the best life-journey-of-artist shows I’ve seen in a very long time. But as I watched GAS members interacting with Moje’s work, I really got to thinking about the message on that T-shirt.

At most gallery openings I attend, patrons examine the work, speculate as to the artist’s intent or inspiration, respond to the content or pattern or colors or lighting or whatever, gasp at the prices, talk about how hard it is to make this art, etc., etc. What they don’t generally do is get down-and-dirty about the processes. The artist may volunteer that info, or a smart gallery rep may use a difficult process to justify the price, but I’ve rarely heard non-artist patrons getting all that technical about the mechanics behind the work.

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