The Witty Dentist To The Quivering Patient: "It's All In Your Head"

Literally, get it? Ha ha!

Hypochondriac: A person who constantly believes he or she is ill or is about to become ill.

Psychosomatic: 1. Of or pertaining to a physical disorder that is caused by or notably influenced by emotional factors. 2. Pertaining to or involving both the mind and the body.

Went to the dentist this morning. My upper and lower teeth were pretty much in some degree of agony most of the day yesterday and during large chunks of last night. I didn't even enjoy eating my husbands birthday cupcakes I made of yellow cake drowned in duncan hines frosting. Didn't enjoy either one of them. Ahem.

Anyway, made haste to get to the dentist this morning, certain I would not be going to work as I would be recovering from what was sure to be a very complicated and involved dental procedure and that everybody would ooh and aah that I was even so tough as to have made it through the night with such evil residing in the right side of my head.

Well, damned if there was NOTHING on xray. And nothing he could SEE, except that my gums are terribly irritated and swollen! Apparently the evil in my head is actually in the brain portion rather than the physical portion. I'm so confused!

Bless my dentist he prefers to wait things out rather than charging in with unnecessary procedures (so un-medical professional of him I think!) so he says I should wait it out the next few days. I told him I'd eaten popcorn and he thought perhaps a piece of shell got stuck but then came out when I was flossing like a madwoman over the last couple of days. The pain I'm going through could be due to left over swelling.

Or I may have a virus that set up shop in there - he even mentioned the herpes virus and told me not to kiss my husband or kids for three weeks. WHAT!?! I've never even had a cold sore, how could that be! Not kiss my husband or kids?

Or he said he could send me to an endodontist who would likely tell me the same thing he did.

So great, there's nothing officially wrong. That's nice, no root canal is immediately imminent. But now I'm stuck still in this imaginary pain limbo where it really really hurts - I mean I would take childbirth pain over this pain any day, yet on paper it doesn't exist.

Makes me want to procede with my implausible but highly tempting idea of just having them:

A) Knock me out

B) Pull every tooth in my ever loving head

C) Replace them all with shiny, white, perfectly aligned implants.

I would then live happily ever after and in a million years they'd dig up my corpse and marvel at my pearly whites.