Radix malorum

One of my teeth is dying, and its death-throes are putting me through hell. It began on Sunday (or so): a low aching in the jawbone that came and went in half-hour waves. It wasn't anything significant then, a minor annoyance, like the occasional nerve-twinges I suffer from (doesn't everyone?) but which go away after a few days. In this case, it did not go away. It has become a walloping pulsing crimson ball of agony. Until this morning, vicodin was keeping me human; I have since either developed an immunity, or the pain is seated at too deep a level for anything short of morphine to affect it. My dentist - she of the exquisite bones and strangely detached bedside manner - saw me on an emergency appointment yesterday. The verdict: root canal, pronto. She scheduled me for next Friday; I called this morning and apparently sounded close enough to an act of homicide to justify bumping me up to tomorrow. At 10:15 in the morning, she will drill into my tooth and scrape away all the dying roots and pulp that make my tooth a living thing, leaving behind little more than a skull. It will look like all the other teeth around it, with one exception: it will be empty, it will be dead.

I've had a root canal before - trust me, my dramatics are anything but amateur. The last one, administered in Glendale, California by a star graduate of the Josef Goebbels school of schadenfreude, left me literally screaming at the wheel of my car to offset the pain. Ten minutes later I was picking painkillers up off the carpet in a scene worthy of Neely O'Hara.

You'd think, with that as a template, I would be terrified about tomorrrow: I'm not. I'm quite excited. The thought of that needle slicing into my gum and delivering sweet numb oblivion is positively dreamy. Any fear is also mitigated somewhat by my sheer seething fury at the cost that this brief jaunt in the dentist's chair will incur to me. Thanks to my employer's sterling health benefits - yes, the ones that are supposed to justify and offset the sub-standard salaries we command - I will be paying for 50% of this debacle: $475, boys and girls. And that's not counting the crown that will eventually have to be applied. I could embark now on a rant about the futility of a middle-class existence, the endless cycle of reversals, the hateful, gall-churning toil of staying afloat, I could curse and wail with stirring rage - but I won't. My ibuprofen levels are dangerously high, and I suspect I would just return sober in a day or two and delete it all.