I know Davie Gie, your situation is so much worse . . .

A crown fell out of my mouth over the weekend, a tiny little chunk of porcelain with some tooth attached. It fell out right before I left for the movies where I planned to consume a bag of popcorn and that is a good thing as finding a little white thing in a bag of little white things in the dark would be difficult.
"But it doesn't hurt," I tell the dental receptionist as I suck the little nub.  "They won't want you to wait on this," came back the response.There's that "They" again.  For every situation in your life there is a They watching and waiting to comment, and usually unfavorably.

 I am plowing through a blizzard's slushy snow the next morning and trying to ignore the four-wheel drive vehicles lined up in my rear view mirror.  I am the auntie Bea of winter drivers and I always arrive safe and sound although usually late.  Were there lots of cancellations, I ask the receptionist. Oh no, she said, with all the four wheel drives out there we don't get the cancellations like we used to.  Hmmmf.

You won't be here very long, she says to me. If they can't glue it right back on they will set up another time to do the prep work.  Three appointments, I say to myself, all for a tooth the size of a Q-tip puff.
 Chris is my dentist and I have been seeing him since the 1980's on a recommendation from my parents.  He was a young dentist with no customers back then so he filled his days doing pro bono work for people of small means.  Ya gotta like the guy and he has a big corny smile beneath very blue eyes.  But he is booked today so I am seeing the alternative dentist, a woman who is  married to a dermatologist and I had once been his patient before an insurance change. I remember the walls of his office covered with Green Bay Packer plaques.  I find this unusual as most professionals prefer anonymous prints of waterfalls or farm buildings. Like all dermatologists, Dr.Hoy has very white, sun-untouched skin. In fact he is the whitest man I had ever seen and he had heard every Packers  heckler joke so I do not tell him any.
Mrs. Dr. Hoy is telling the assistant that her husband had attended the Packers/Eagles game in Pennsylvania over the weekend but chose not to wear his cheesehead hat at the airport.  And it is a good thing as there might  have been one less Packers-loving dermatologist in this town. Dr. Hoy must watch all Packers games in the basement of his house as he screams and rants and is "like a four-year-old child having a tantrum."  I remember the doctor and his kind, intelligent eyes and calm demeanor and I have a difficult time picturing this, but I know this to be true as I have a college-educated husband who does the same thing.  Same behavior, different team.
Two hours later I stagger toward the appointment desk. Lied to again by the medical profession. I have had needles, drills, saws, picks - maybe forty tiny weapons of dental destruction introduced into my mouth in that time period.  I take my numb lip and head back into the snow.