Dentist

I didn't realize how tough Rebekah was until this week. At a visit to the dentist on Monday I had a cavity filled. They offered me a choice between the amalgam, which they called silver in front of me, and a resin composite. The major difference was that the second cost $80 more. Discussing the choice with Rebekah, I learned that she had only received silver fillings in her life and didn't even know resin existed, so I chose that route also. During this visit, for the first time I did not feel the drill dancing on the nerve in the center of my tooth. As I sat there thinking my hair was on fire because of the smell of burning keratin, I thought about the poor people who lived before the days of local anesthesia. In fact, a friend in the history department had recently told me that a tooth ache in the ancient world completely debilitated a person. In a class on Manicheism, a professor told him that he thought the doctrine of the body as evil was especially poignant when dealing with dental pain. So I made it a point to thank the doctor for so effectively numbing my face, which due to the Novocain sounded something like this: "Fank ooo so mush, (drool) I dint feel thing." Surprisingly, I didn't have to go back in time to find a civil-war veteran, or travel to a small Sri Lankan village to find an object for my pity. It sufficed to find someone who had grown up in France, where numbing for cavity work was (is?) seen as unnecessary. My respect for Rebekah grew alot.