When I was living in Washington, DC, way back in the olden times of the late 1980s, I ordered a lot of Chinese delivery from the Blue Diamond restaurant. They were a few blocks away from my Dupont Circle studio apartment and had great food. 

One day I ordered Kung Pao chicken. Mistake. Oh, it tasted great. Only thing is, the peanuts broke a tooth. I had no dentist or dental coverage, but I found a dentist a few blocks away (I think he was on the corner of Farragut and some state avenue) and I paid out of pocket (I was a poor graduate student so the Bank of Mom and Dad actally paid.) 

Why am I blogging about a dental proedure? Because yesterday I had that tooth pulled. OK, so, why is that worthy of a blog post? Aside from the fact that this is my blog and I can write whatever I please, it’s that after the tooth originally broke, it needed a root canal and a crown. It needed additional work done just before; the dentist had used a then ‘revolutionary’ tooth reconstruction substance he called ‘build up’ to hold it all together. Safe to say that after that, plus the root canal and crowning, the tooth looked like a franken-tooth. 

But it had held together since 1986. Almost everytime I did a personal inspection of my teeth, or eat nuts, I’d worry about it. I’d look in and still see it there, in all its dental weirdness. 

But my new dentist where I live now said a wall had fallen off and its days were numbered. The tooth seemed to have a different opinion as the extraction was difficult. I swear the dentist (she’s little) almost had to climb on my chest to get a better perspective and angle on the thing (it had broken during the extraction and she had little to grab onto.)

I feel a part of me is missing. OK, that IS literally true, but I meant more in a mystical, metaphysical sense. Something that I worried about for 38 years, and was a visible connection to an earlier time in my life, is now gone. Good Golly, Miss Molly, am I sentimental or what?

My old dentist also gave me a free dental cleaning as a going away present in the Summer of 1991 (I was moving to California.) I just thought I’d throw that in there.  

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