For The Girl:

Lost in Darkness,
my life before
Meandering the sands
of a distant shore

But all I loved,
with all my core
continued my heart
there would be more

And then it was you,
upon this shore
And it was you,
forever more

For all my faults
which might not cure
Please keep me yours
forever more

For when we find
that life is yore
I will remain yours
forever more

We’ve been crazy busy running around practising our dancing for the upcoming Pro Am and working away in Workland. The Girl is jumpy with excitement that she’ll be switching careers soon and doing something that she trained for years ago, but never fully switched over to.

We saw the last part of Nicholas Nickleby on the weekend and were awed not only by its magnitude but by the way it exploded Dickens’ themes into life. Bravo to the cast, crew, and musicians who brought the show our way.

Now on to the meat of this post:

Shortly after I posted that I accepted drug money as payment, my blog became erratically glitchy. Not only did I notice this, but my readers did as well. Well actually only fragileheart mentioned to me that she did. That’s probably because she’s on the internet 24/7 commenting on everyone’s blog. Basically if you have a blog, she’s probably commented on it. And if she hasn’t don’t worry, she’ll get to it eventually. Not that there’s anything wrong with that or anything. I think it’s really cool and she does liven up my blog with her comments.

Anyway, my theory about the whole thing is that Canada’s internal security service (our version of the FBI and MI5), the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, probably got interested in the post because of the drug angle title. They don’t mount people too much these days but they do have a budget for surveillance.

Their packet sniffer is probably an old Intel 486 that they attached downstream from me. Instead of passively checking my readers out, it slowed everything down like crazy. The whole situation got me thinking though: What if my readers had something to hide from the RCMP? I’ve been trying to encourage people to comment on the blog, but what if some of those commenters on that post have things to hide?

So I did some bloggound checking on those commenters and sure enough, suspicions abound. Who actually might be the real drug users around here?

Let’s start with Erin. She (he?) seems to be hungover a lot. One hangover remedy they recommend involves vitamins that help to reduce pain: http://paintmorgantownred.com/…/sunday-hangover-cure-11/. Uh huh. Vitamins that reduce pain. Yup.

Then we have Monique who I didn’t know was a woman of colour. I thought all of the pictures on her website were underexposed. She seems angry about various things quite often. Her doctors have told her that she has tortured her body too much in the past (http://moniquerenae.com/…/im-going-to-diet/). Really…?

We have BT Cassidy who walks through dark alleys meeting people: http://theanatomy…/and-now-little-more-about-inspiration.html.

There’s Melo whose goal seems to be to make money one way or another on the internet. You know how it’s been said that money corrupts: http://www.i-tong.com/2008/03/05/money4banners/

Fonzie’s Ghost is my cockroach friend. If you’ve read my posts about him you’ll know what a good people-user he is. He’s smart but doesn’t have many morals…

Person Who Is Hormonal And Keeps Changing Their Name: They admitted that they’re almost addicted to pot.

Of course, there’s fragileheart who must have been on drugs to post this: http://www.fragileheart.com/…/its-like-a-trainwreck…/

Laney is a good friend of ours…a really good friend who now lives in Switzerland. We know her well enough to know that she’s not all that sweet and innocent as she appears in her blog. Stay away, far away — which isn’t a problem considering that she lives atop a mountain over there. Although I’ve had horse meat and found it very good, I’m still not sure how I feel about eating horses: http://whatsuphighup.blogspot.com/…/not-for-veggetarians.html

Finally, there’s Rudy whom I’ve known for a long time also. However, one of his recent posts lists a person who is most definitely a regular pot smoker. Guilt by association I say: http://www.amid.com/werd/good-people-day-2008/

So out of all of this I know that the RCMP will need to upgrade to a more powerful computer in order to track all of these other suspects. Hopefully that’ll take some of the heat and glitchiness off my site.

I usually retreat cases like this (access the crown, remove the post, redo the root canal work), but the patient was sure the crown would come off without the post in the tooth, so fine, we decided to do the surgery instead. For those who understand what I’m talking about so far, if the crown is at risk of falling off without the post (during the temporization period), the crown is likely not fitting the tooth as well as it should and is probably leaking. Surgery in situations like that ends up being a short-term solution.

The surgery went fairly smoothly, and I got a decent shot of the root end after I’d resected and filled it. The largest amount of granulation tissue was on the buccal root surface near the apical/middle third junction. The culprit turned out to be a lateral canal. I filled the lateral canal and two main canals with white MTA. The apical bevel looks much sharper in the photo than it really is.

All the bright red is blood-covered jawbone. Here’s the key to the numbers in the picture:

1. Crown of tooth
2. Lateral canal
3. Buccal canal
4. Isthmus between canals
5. Palatal canal

There is also a sinus perforation that doesn’t show well on the clinical photo.

I saw an 11 year old boy yesterday for a root canal.

This was his second appointment with me, but the first appointment for treatment. When I had previously seen him for consultation, I met his dad. His Dad, a really nice guy who wants to do what’s right for his 4 children, told me how he recently found a job after not having a stable one for a couple of years. He’s finally got some money to take his family to the dentist but one daughter needs 3 root canals and this son needs one. The daughter is older and the root canal work is fairly straight forward, so their family dentist will do the work. The root canal for the son is more complicated. All of this work, however, is costing quite a bit and you could see how the prospect of having to pay for it really worried Dad.

Although the root canal was needed on a 6-year molar and the boy is 11, the distal canal was still quite wide, and the pulp chamber huge. At the consultation I wasn’t able to obtain any reliable vitality readings from this tooth or the adjacent ones. The root canal was needed because of approximation of caries to the pulp.

I informed Dad that endodontic therapy was necessary, but I’d assess the pulp once I got into the tooth and decide at that time if definitive treatment would be done or if I’d do a direct pulp cap.

Today after I got into the pulp chamber, I found a vital, uninfected pulp that was not hyperemic. I decided to do a modifed Cvek pulpotomy. I unroofed the chamber, folded some pulp back onto itself and then capped it with white Mineral Trioxide Aggregate (MTA). I’m hoping that this will allow for continued dentinal thickening of root and pulp chamber. Full root canal work might be necessary in the future, but we’ll assess this as necessary.

Dad was very happy that things went so well. After I debriefed him in the reception room, I noticed him pulling out a wad of 20’s to pay for treatment. I made my retreat back to my private office to write my treatment notes (and finish dropping my daily entrecards).

AssistantGirl came in with the post-op xray shortly after and proceeded to ask me about Cvek Pulpotomies. As we were talking, OfficeMom and ReceptionChick both walked into my office together.

“Close your eyes,” OfficeMom said to me.

“Huh? Why?” I said.

“Just do it,” she said.

So I closed my eyes and soon felt her putting something near my nose.

“Smell this. What do you smell?” she said.

So I did. It smelled like pot (how I know this is irrelevant to this post).

“It smells like weed,” I said.

“Open your eyes,” she said.

So I did and it was the wad of 20’s that our Dad had paid with.

I took a deeper sniff and their was no questioning the aroma of marijuana. In fact, it was so strong that if we had rolled just the bills themselves and lit them up, we would probably have gotten stoned.

So this is how I accepted drug money as payment for work done. I feel like a greasy mob criminal attorney now. But at least the Cvek pulpotomy is much less expensive than a full root canal…I wonder what the bank is going to think when we make our deposit.

I’ve had this picture on my ‘puter for the last few days because I can’t figure out what I find so disturbing about it. It’s a cute teddy bear, but as I look at the picture I get the same feeling as nails-on-a-chalkboard.