mad as a hatter

I LOVE radiology. I have time to do all these things. The self-care, the shopping, the crossing off on little lists of things that have piled up in dusty corners of my mind (lots of those). Of course, the downside is that I now have time to do these things. Just got back from the dentist and sitting here with a thick and tingly lip, I'm thinking maybe I was happier on wards, crazed and mentally benumbed. I had to get a filling and, gasp, a crown. The dentists have been advising me to get a crown for NINE years now, since that hideous root canal I endured before leaving for Peace Corps. Apparently, the tooth will break off eventually. Seems a little, I don't know, catastrophic, but do I look like a dentist? Umm, no. But now the tooth has some decay and the gum is all irritated, and so this morning after emerging from a three hour X-ray viewing session, I willingly sat it in a chair as my very sweet, but no-nonsense, dentist ground the remainder of the tooth down to a wee nub. Oh. My. God. The drills! I kept reminding myself to relax and breathe, but I kept realizing that I had every possible muscle clenched in my entire body. I had a death grip on the "Good Housekeeping" magazine I failed to dispose of properly. All riight, deep breath, relax... CLENCH!
I opted for the amalgam filling, full of mercury as it is. It's in the back, for one, and no one will ever see it. Plus, it'll fit in with all my other fillings and not feel like the odd, you know, tooth out. Mostly though I love the sound of the stuff being packed into my head. Good ol' Dr. K, my childhood dentist, described it as the sound of walking in deep snow with moon boots, before I had my first filling 25 years ago. And it is. I am transported back to blindingly bright winter days, tromping out into the fresh snow. Trying to follow my dads footprints, scrunch, scrunch scrunch. Ah...