March 30, 2004
#53 :: Tooth cap
I spent the morning in the dental chair, paying for a lifetime of chewing hard candy with my incisors instead of my molars. (Two or three packs of Pep-o-Mint Life Savers a day during about a year and a half's worth of court trials while at the Philadelphia Inquirer and Los Angeles Times accounted for the bulk of the abuse). The nervous nibbling had basically whittled my lower, misaligned middle incisor down to about 2/3 of its height, which left the ones on either side jutting up at horrible angles like ruined skyscrapers in a bad postapocalyptic sci-fi drama (click on picture to see the see grainy "before", inset). Thus snaggletoothed, I looked older than my years and considerably rougher than my breeding (I had the air of being ready for a fight that a shortage of street savvy would doom me to lose). It was time to get it all fixed. The able Dr. John Treinen (DDS, Sherman Oaks, CA) shot me full of novocain - scoring an excruciating direct hit on my mandibular nerve on the way in with the needle - and we were off. I'll spare you the rest of the gory, grinding, plaster-casting details, but I'm so pleased I shook the doctor's hand. This one's a temporary, made of some sort of sickly, yellowish wonder-plastic. The real ceramic one's being cast at the lab.