Ann
Ipock
Humorist,
author, speaker
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Georgetown Times Column
Trouble comes
in three’s but let’s hope, not in four’s
By Ann Ipock October
06, 2004
If it’s true that trouble comes in threes, I’m getting worried.
I’ve already experienced trouble No. 1 and trouble No. 2 this summer.
For starters, my computer quit/broke/malfunctioned several times during
a three-month period.
Finally, it gave up the ghost and “crashed.” I had no other
choice but to order a brand new one.
I didn’t realize just how vital my computer was to my business and
personal well-being until the three-week loss of e-mail and the Internet,
not to mention word processing, as in writing columns like this one.
This seems like a good time to give a positive plug for the Waccamaw Library,
because they truly saved my life and my job as a free-lance writer.
Facing deadlines, accepting speaking opportunities, making travel arrangements,
and working on P.R. material, I never would have been able to meet those
demands without the computer services that the local library offers —
free of charge, I might add.
I was there almost every day for over two weeks, in a cozy, comfortable
setting with lots of other busy computer-users.
A few of us even managed to “bond” over those days. Hey to
Pleshette and Gale and Mary? (Anna’s Mom). And employees Carlethia,
Debra, Avis, and others were always there with a smile and a “glad-we-could-
help” attitude. Thanks, friends.
My second streak of bad luck came in the form of a root canal. Ouch!
I knew the night I bit down on something tiny, but quite hard and felt
that lightning-bolt-like pain that this was not good. I went to my regular
dentist.
She probed, X-rayed, then tapped my tooth with the end of her mirror.
“Nuh-uh,” I mouthed. Strange, but it really didn’t hurt.
Then she got a little more aggressive, squirting icy water, then hot water,
directly on the suspected tooth. Again, I merely shrugged. Surprisingly,
it felt sensitive, but I wouldn’t call it pain, certainly not the
feeling I’d had the day before.
That night I came home and slept OK with the help of a mild painkiller.
Oddly, the next morning when I woke up, a different tooth hurt.
Whereas my first molar on the bottom hurt originally, the pain was now
on the first molar on the top.
My dentist sent me to an endodontist who told me that I had a hair-line
fracture of the root of the upper tooth. The first pain is what is called
“referred” pain.
I wonder if that’s because the pain shows up somewhere else (the
medical explanation)?
Or is it really because you have to be referred somewhere else?
At the endodontist visit, he explained what would be involved with a root
canal, a temporary and permanent crown; the latter two procedures my own
dentist would perform.
No need to tell me because I used to be a dental hygienist and I even
once assisted with a root canal. The endodontist then checked his watch
and, with a gleam in his eyes, said he could begin the work right away.
No way, I thought.
“Sorry,” I said. I told him I was too hot (true story —
hot flash and hot flush) and that I’d be back in a day or two wearing
something cooler — and I didn’t mean dinky, either.
Plus the flash and the flush were making me downright irritable and fidgety
and I needed time to think this all over.
The next thing I knew his assistant walked in with a thermometer and stuck
it in my mouth (98.2). I could have saved her the trouble if she had only
let me explain.
I’d just attended a Sasee Magazine luncheon honoring us hat recipients;
and I was “all dressed up”— a perfect outfit, both weight
and choice, for sitting in a near-by large and breezy, tropical-themed
restaurant where I was fed blackened salmon and enjoyed a lovely view
of the water; but certainly not for laying supine with a 500-watt dental
light glaring in my eyes in a cramped, stuffy office with large, latex-gloved
hands messing with my molar.
Finally, they let me go, but only after I promised to return two days
later.
Forty eight hours later, a scenario that I’ve been through twice
already in my life unfolded.
I lay there with that rubber dam nearly suffocating me attached to my
tooth and covering the lower half of my face, my mouth stretched from
here to kingdom-come for a solid hour, with the endodontist occasionally
asking me questions that I absolutely could not answer.
Why do they do that?
Like, he said, “Now, you do have an appointment to see your regular
dentist for the temporary crown, right?”
“Uth,” I said holding up 10 fingers to represent “in
10 days.”
I guess he thought I was conveying a hidden message.
I think I detected him raise one eyebrow. But it was impossible to say
the words out loud: “Yes, as a matter of fact, I’m going to
see her in 10 days” with all that paraphernalia in my mouth.
So, now I’ve been really careful, “walking on eggshells,”
as they say, trying not to bring on trouble No. 3 — but I’m
afraid it’s too late.
Before my permanent crown was even cemented on my molar, I got the “bad
news” after my annual visit to my ‘female/female doctor.’
(She’s a female and she treats females: get it?)
Not to be too personal, but I am now being told I must have the big “H”
or hysterical-ectomy, as a friend put it.
Another called it “his-trectomy.”
I’m trying to look on the bright side: maybe I’ll lose some
weight. Surely that “organ” they’re yanking out weighs
a couple of pounds, right?
And another thing, I won’t have to go through “hot flashes
or hot flushes” or PMS — possibly no more irritability and
sleepless nights.
Well, the year is almost up and at least my troubles will be behind me.
Ah, you don’t think trouble comes in four’s, do you?