Two cavities, a temporary crown, a permanent crown, two fillings, three visits, six hours in the chair, and many days of pain... That's what I get for putting off the dentist for three years. This last time I had stopped going because of an insurance snafu, but truthfully I don't remember ever going on a steady basis throughout my life... Seems I always play catch-up after a couple of slack years, go for two or three or four cleanings, then put if off again for a couple more years. But this round of avoidance has definitely produced the worst results.

No wait, I take that back. In 1990, when I was 24, I had to have all four wisdom teetch extracted. Due to the funky way my teeth are arranged (blamed on my falling on my face from the top of a bunkbed in early childhood), those budding teeth were growing in sideways, causing much pain, so they had to go. My younger sister drove me to the procedure. I was given a shot, asked to count backward from 100 (making it to about 98), and after what seemed like only a passing moment, I woke up (actually an hour or so later). A little groggy, but otherwise fine, right?

Well, I ended up having a delayed reaction. Two or three days after the extraction, my face started swelling up. Over the course of a few days, it got worse until the swelling actually gave me a black eye and I had to stay home from work. Good times!

Any thinking back to dental activities from long ago always bring to mind Steve Martin as the sadistic dentist in the Little Shop of Horrors remake, as well as Saturday Night Live's Ira Needleman (the singing oral surgeon).... the latter of which I surprisingly can't find on the World Wide Web. That may be for the best...