May 14, 2017

Real life Takes You to the Dentist

By Regina Frances Carey

©2017

As a teenage girl, thoughts of a beautiful life take over.  Watching old movies with glamorous women and handsome, dashing men invade your thoughts so much that you become a creature of dreams.  You want romance. You expect romance.  You expect your life to be a continuous romantic encounter that will never end.  Then, reality hits like a sucker-punch to the jaw.

As an older woman, I often reflect back on my life and wonder what I could have done to change it.  Should I have dated more than I did, which was very little?  Should I have not been afraid to get hurt, which is why I didn’t date much.  Should I have gone to college earlier than I did?  These are some of the questions that I ask myself.  Then, I understand that no matter how I may have done things differently, it still would not have changed some things, such as the reality of life.  Life has good times and bad times, that is a given.  There is no such thing as a fairy-tale life where everything always ends in happiness; sometimes endings are hard and full of sorrow.

Last year I had an abscessed tooth and infection.  It was painful. I tried to relieve the pain with the hope that it was not as bad as I thought.  Then, one night while watching television, I felt like I had been punched in the jaw.  I took aspirin and went to bed still hoping it was nothing much.
When I woke up the next morning and looked in the mirror, I saw that the whole right side of my face was swollen.  I still went to work.  When I arrived at work, the first thing a coworker asked me was “Did you have dental work done last night?”  No, I didn’t, but I knew something was going on.  I couldn’t even open my mouth to drink my coffee.  Then, I thought those dreaded words “I think I need to go to the dentist.”

I hate the dentist.  I have always hated the dentist.  I stay away from the dentist as long as I can.  Then, something like this happens.  I texted a friend I know from the Hibernians, which is an organization that I belong to, and asked if she knew a good dentist.  She gave me the name of one, so I called and got an appointment for that night.  He gave me a prescription for penicillin to kill the infection, then made another appointment to extract three teeth.  And that’s how it went.  To quote the dentist, “You had an emergency.”  I did have an emergency because if the infection had been allowed to spread any further into my cheek, there would have been big problems.

To sum up, I now have been making regular visits to the dentist because I needed a lot of work done due to staying away for so long.  I had one more tooth extracted in addition to the original three, oral surgery on the gum, an implant in one tooth and a crown on another.  And I still have cavities to be taken care of.  So, the moral of the story is, pay attention to real life and forget thinking that things are not that bad just because you don’t want them to be that bad.  Life is full of things we don’t and won’t like, but have to do.  The sooner we take care of those things, the better it is for all of us.


Thanks for reading and hope to write again soon.

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