Wishes Come True, Not Free

Some days are great days. A day like this past Saturday, where I waited in line all morning with some of my favorite people for tickets to see my favorite show, Into the Woods, which was masterfully mounted by the Public Theater with Donna Murphy personifying the magic of musical theater. Or this past Monday, when my 201 class at the Upright Citizens Brigade put on an awesome show and a ton of my awesome friends came. Those are great days.

Some days are steaming piles of crap door to door. I went to the dentist yesterday. I’m not unique in my hatred of the dentist, though my issues hopefully are. You may remember my blogs on Timmy the Tooth. NYU student dentist Timmy propped his chin on my forehead for hours on end, while chewing gum. He made me bleed often. He made me cry slightly less often. He was incompetent. The moral of the story was that it was totally worth it to save nearly two thousand dollars to get a fairly expensive procedure done. All it cost me was my soul.

I now have dental insurance. I have a nice dentist who is skilled and sensitive to my pain. Not once has she propped her chin on my forehead. That said, getting shots and having a cavity filled still hurts. Mouth stuff is distinctly terrible, because I’m generally a tough cookie, but don’t poll my close friends and family on this matter. They are haters.

Yesterday, after tearing up my mouth, my new and excellent dentist tore up my heart. She told me my crown, put in by the accursed Student Dentist Timmy, was made wrong. It had to be redone. It was going to cost about lots of money. I can fully believe that Timmy did a bad job but that doesn’t stop me from being pissed.

My ire carried over into lying in bed last night as my teeth sent shots of pain up my mouth and down to my spleen. It carried over when I dragged myself out of bed to go to the gym and missed my train. It exploded when I got to the gym and it was closed due to flooding and barely made it home in time to shower before work. My rage petered out as I threw a full-on adult temper tantrum on the platform of my subway station as I missed a second train of the morning. After saying “fuck” approximately seventeen times and stomping the ground, I felt a little better. After shooting a dramatic text to the Awesome Opossum and huffing my way across 51^st Street to work, I felt even better. Now that I’m sitting at work anticipating sweet potato fries and I must say the whole day feels bright and new.*

*I have reached out to patient advocates at NYU and am hoping to hear back shortly. Let’s all send positive vibes to a quick resolution with a complete nervous breakdown from yours truly.