How You Spell Relief

If I regularly (or frequently) frequented opium dens and smoked a bowl or two until I was lost in a dreamy haze, I could not thereby obtain more bliss than I did in the dentist's chair Wednesday as the syringe passed the anesthetic into my jaw and the numbness spread through it. I woke up that morning feeling like the tooth was being drilled continuously. It was a long day of demoralizing, will-sapping pain, and I only managed to scratch out about three e-mails to friends. A cancellation at the dentist's allowed me to come in that afternoon, and I leapt into the chair the way a happy dog jumps into the car. "Let's get you out of pain," the good doctor said, and then he did.

I couldn't smile, because I was holding my mouth open, of course. But I was smiling on the inside. And my mental faculties returned, such as they are, and I was able to be curious about things again. How is it that shooting the anesthetic (procaine? lidocaine?) into one spot creates numbness on a whole side of your head? Does it spread physically, or does something happen to the nerves, or what? And as the dentist plumbed out the dead nerve, I wondered: What good does the live nerve do? Is it like the Vice President, just hanging out, not doing much, until a serious problem arises? No idea. And no way to ask, with my mouth all full of tubes and drills and fingers. The dentist told the assistant he wanted to irrigate the tooth, and I wondered what the etymology of the word was. And was it related to "rigatoni"? I'd only eaten a slice of bread the whole day. But then it was all done, and I went home and had dinner. When the numbness wore off, the area was fairly sore, but that was all. I was no longer the pitiable sufferer I had been—I was pitiable still, perhaps, but not because my tooth hurt, at least.

So that's why I haven't done much blogging—if you can blog while a tooth is mulling over whether to abcess or not, the stuff you're made of is sterner than mine. And I've been trying to get caught up—I didn't blog in the middle of the week and I didn't get much work done either, to be honest. So now it's Saturday and I'm being constructive.  If you've got time on your hands yourself, check out some Fats Waller: