Root of the problem

I knew something was wrong in my pie hole when my front tooth starting aching and I hadn't been chewing on anything plastic, which I'm wont to do. Just ask my fellow copy desk monkeys at the prison work camp. Dogs get rawhide, I get plastic Bics.

We were in line for the Dumbo ride (Wife lets me fly the giant plastic elephant) at DismalLand when my tooth felt like it was about to give birth to a demon molar that would migrate through my nasal cavity and explode in my brain, killing me while at the happiest place on earth. I debated whether to tell Wife that one of my choppers was trying to crawl back up into my gums and hide from the double jalapeno and cheese heart attack dog I was planning to throw down for dinner at Mickey's "Where's Pluto?" Diner. Finally, I caved and told her my tooth was likely explode in a fiery rain if she leaned in for a little Disney smooch.

The pain subsided over the next couple of days and I forgot what all the hubub was. Then came a Friday that brought sphincter-clenching pain in my upper jaw, cheek, and nose; it made my eye twitch and turned my sideburns gray. I called the family tooth butcher, but of course the slack ass closes the shop on Fridays because sticking his fingers into folks' food caves is such hard, demanding work. On par with Phoenix road crews laying asphalt in July, I'm sure. Motrin became a fast friend, and I popped them like they were Milk Duds.

It didn't take the butcher long to figure out the chiclet that was giving me a bad time was dying a slow - and painful - death. He did a highly scientific test at first to find what stage of death the tooth was hitting:

"Does it hurt when I bang this ball-ping hammer against it."

"What do you think, doc? How 'bout I take that hammer and bang away on your left nut? Do you think that will hurt?"

With that determined he said there wasn't much else he could do. I guess my general butcher doesn't get his hands dirty with root canals, which is what he determined I needed.

That's where I went today, to see the root ripper. And what I realized while buckled into the death chair (is it a bad sign when you see cake blood along the head rest?) the root ripper uses the same tools I used when I changed out the garbage disposal at the compound this weekend.

Phillip head screwdrivers, standards screwdrivers, a wrench, a wet-dry vac for the fountain of drool (or the inevitable leak I found after hooking up said garbage disposal), and of course a drill; the tools of the trade looked like something from the set of "Deadwood." And I didn't feel any better when stretched a slab of rubber across my gaping maw and tacked it down with a gasket.

As the ripper shoved a needle the size of Utah through the roof of my mouth I noticed on the ceiling a TV screen that was unfortunately off.

"You want to watch something while I fry this nerve," the ripper says.

"You got any midget porn?"

"Girl on girl, multi-racial, or gay?"

The ripper wasn't a bad guy after all, I thought. But that was before the drilling and digging and scraping and smoke started. And once all that got going, the furthest thing from my mind was little people pumping away doggie style. There was room on the pain train for one passenger, and that seat was reserved for me.

Once all was said and done, they forced a pair of Advil down my gullet and then made me wash the pills down with water that landed more on my shirt than in my throat, giving the paingivers something to chuckle about.

If there's a bright side to this harrowing tale, it's that the ripper likes to see his patients happy, and I know this because the dude prescribed a bucket of vicodin for the pain which I plan to pop shortly while watching a movie. Hey, they're not much different than Jujubees at the theater, right?