AND HOW DID YOU SPEND YOUR AFTERNOON?

I will venture a guess that you did not have as much fun as I did!  And I can also imagine how envious you will be when you hear what I did!  I had the joy and good fortune to spend three, yes I said THREE, hours in the dentist's chair!  Don't you wish you could have been there with me to have all the fun I did?

Long story.  Broken tooth.  Should have had a crown over a year ago, but I never got around to it.  I was in for cleaning two weeks ago and the dentist convinced me that I needed to have this crown put on the very broken next to the back tooth, so I made the appointment and then felt obligated to keep it.

It used to be that you went in one time for the crown prep and impressions,  and then they put a temporary crown on while they sent the measurements off to get the crown made.  Well, now our dentist, because of all the money we pay him, has bought this wonderful system where you can get it all done in one day.  But it does take three hours.

He came in first and drilled and formed the tooth stub, getting ready for the measurements for the crown.  His 14 year old assistant, who claimed she's been doing this for a couple of years after going to school in Texas, which I don't believe at all because she'd have to have started when she was 7, followed and sweetly said she would have to take a few pictures.  Few?  47.  Yup, 47.  And it's not Xrays with the camera thing on the outside of your cheek.  She stuck a full 35 mm camera in my  mouth (well it felt like it anyhow) and clicked away, taking pictures of every angle imaginable.  The photos were uploaded to a computer as she took them, and when she finally finished, she started playing with the images, moving, enlarging, smoothing edges, building side walls, etc, until she had a tooth looking thing on the screen.  It was bright blue.  She called the dentist in and he looked it over, straightening a margin here and smoothing a bump there, and then they pushed the button which makes the tooth in the image of the image.  Really.  I don't know how it works, but about 20 minutes later, the young teenager came back in with the tooth and she tried it on for size.  She called the dentist in, and he looked things over and said he needed to file something down a little.  But the tooth seemed stuck in my mouth.  Lots of tugging and pulling later, he got it off and exclaimed that it was snug.  Oh, really, do you think?  When they were happy with the fit they brought it to the oven downstairs to cook it.  At several thousand degrees for 25 minutes.  When it was finished, he popped it in, it fit, he glued with the evil tasting glue stuff, and sent me on my way with a warning not to eat caramels or chew steak for a couple of hours.

Caramels?  Steak?  I told him I was having a glass of wine and discoloring his pretty white tooth.

Now, don't you wish you could have had that kind of an afternoon?  I knew you'd be jealous.