Crown Me

[elfs]

I hate the smell of my own bones burning. It's a shadowed, grey smell ominously full of unfamiliar chemicals. It is the smell of friction and dust thrown about by a dentist's drill as he gets Moria-deep into your jaw, pushing down toward the nerve, stopping only to leave a layer of bone as thin as a mosquito's wing between the outside world and a direct connection to the pain centers of your brain.

Well, my jaw at least. The pain left is familiar, only in that I've been living with it for a few weeks now, but he claims that this is different, the pain of surgical insult as he filled and capped and reinforced what was still clean and pure of poor, tortured tooth #19, following sister tooth #31 into the ignominious future of a crown.

Still, hopefully I'll be able to eat cleanly on the right side of my mouth soon, something I haven't been able to do for weeks. It only hurt when encountering cold or especially high pressure, but it was still enough to discourage me from eating there.

Lunch today was fajitas of onions, green bell peppers, and ham, all sauteéd until very soft, with Monterey jack cheese softened on top in the oven, and an iced latté with no sugar. The caffeine reinforces the effects of the ibuprofen.

Comments

[amindofiron.livejournal.com]

you know, I love your writing rather a lot, but gods below that description of dental work made my body want to do the dead spider curl. congratulations, your writing has reached a visceral level rarely encountered.



and it's kinda painful. :P

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Sorry, one of my beta readers mentioned that, on my last story, the imagery was as flat as a middle school band performance. I'm practicing.

[amindofiron.livejournal.com]

this imagery was nice and sharp. Sharp and point and yeek, so I'd say job well done. :)

[srmalloy.livejournal.com]

I remember a root canal I had (old filling came out, was too deep to just ream out the hole and stuff in a new one); the two things I could have particularly done without were the sensation from the little reamer (a tool that looks like a tiny wire test-tube brush) that the dentist used to make sure the cored-out root was clear of any organic material, and the smell/taste of the gutta-percha burning -- the little rods that the dentist inserts into the empty roots can't be cut off properly, so they're cut approximately and then burned down to the correct length.