Toothache
Last Sunday, I woke up with a toothache.
This really is news because I’m 45 years old and I never had a toothache in all that time. The closest I ever came to what I felt on Sunday was getting my braces tightened once a month back in junior high.
On Sunday, when I first noticed the toothache, I shrugged it off. I figured I would wake up on Monday morning and it would be gone. I didn’t even bring it up to anyone in my family.
But the toothache was not gone when I woke up on Monday. It was worse.
It was so much worse that I went to the dentist that day. She took an X-ray and found damage to the tooth’s ligament and nerve.
“What did you do to this tooth?” asked the dentist.
“Nothing that I know about,” I said. “I woke up this way on Sunday morning. Could I have done this in my sleep?”
She prescribed antibiotics, but said I was likely to need a root canal anyway.
I started taking...