It Might Get Messy

But not necessarily in expected ways. Let’s look at a hypothetical here. Let’s say you’ve been diagnosed with a complicated, painful, life-threatening, illness. Something like, say, cancer. Let’s say the diagnosticians are the best—there is no uncertainty in their call. Let’s say they immediately begin investigations to localize said cancer and that now, 4 weeks later, they know precisely (by which I mean within fractions of millimeters) where tumor tissue resides. Which is in large areas deep in the throat and at the base of the tongue. 


Treatment planning is initiated. Further diagnostics are conducted. Meetings take place. Faxes are exchanged (I know. FAXES?!?!? I couldn’t even remember how to send a fax from the office machine the day they needed one from me). And the first thing everybody says is “yeah, but we can’t do anything until we deal with those teeth”. 


And your first thought is “what frickin’ teeth?!?! Remember those three-dimensional diagnostics? The throat thing? The tongue? I’m pretty sure if there was cancer in any teeth, somebody would have noticed by now.”


I’m still not sure what the hell is going on, BTW, or why these people are obsessed with teeth. But they sure as hell are. They sent in a couple of dentists like Omaha Beach triage nurses. They went through tooth-by-tooth: “This one stays. This one stays. This one goes. Stays. Goes. Goes. Stays.” Etc.


Then they injected me full of biologically active chemicals, climbed on my chest like a bad outtake from an old “Foghorn Leghorn” cartoon, and yanked out 6 of my teeth.


I spent the next day in complete and utter misery. Remind me to tell you about Jon “Josef Mengele” Sujian, the Butcher Dentist of Wayne New Jersey and my personal emotional problems with teeth. But some other time. For the moment, I leave you with this. It is the chewing surface of one of the teeth deemed superfluous last week. If I squint just right, this image looks to me like a frame from that film of “Bigfoot” walking along the that pine forest logging road. You know, the one where you can see it wave to the camera with a little heavy metal “devil horns” swing of its right glove…I mean hand. 

Or does it look like something else, maybe? At least it doesn’t look like a frickin’ tooth… . PS. I had to negotiate with the dentist to get him to give me my teeth, which he did not want to do. Nor is negotiation easy to do with your mandible paralyzed by narcotic drugs. I take the fact that I now possess these teeth as a sign that my negotiation skills, at least, are still good and might survive the next few weeks of cancer treatment hell… .


PS--be sure to visit other nodes in this web


http://docviper.livejournal.com/
http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/
http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/
http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/


Thanks!