Seven Days...
...of unemployment ends pretty much the way it started: With me in Northern Virginia, at AOL.
Or, at least, across the street.
I met up w/ four former co-workers for lunch at Potbelly's in the Dulles 28 Centre, the newest open-air mall going up in NoVA. Ostensibly, I was there to pick up a handful of things I'd left behind in the office because my car was full, but it was a great time to both talk about the layoff (I hadn't really had a chance to talk to any of them) and find out how life is going in the new AOL (answer: Not well; two co-workers were jealous of a third because the third had at least gotten a new set of tasks from his management, while most everyone else is still marching forward with their heads down trying not to look at all the empty cubicles as they soldier on; the fourth was thanking his lucky stars that the former sh-t position of "Marketing" had suddenly become THE place to be in the new ad-dominated AOL). All too quickly, one co-worker had to run off to a 1300 meeting, and after a bit more chatting, I had to split for a 1445 dentist appointment with Virginia Laser Dental, one of the new breed of "Sedation Dentistry" practitioners who numb you up for practically every procedure and make the numbing either practically painless or completely so. (I've been fighting what I was certain was a growing cavity on either a cracked tooth or the molar behind it, which I knew possessed a cracked filling, and I had no desire to be in hideous pain while the dentist figured it out.)
Fortunately, one of the boxes my co-workers brought me contained the new GPS I'd ordered and had delivered to my office (before I left, I cornered John from the mailroom and told him to deliver anything that arrived for me over the next week or so to my former officemate, who was consolidating it with the stuff left behind for later pickup), so I plugged it in, fired it up, answered its default questions, and then told it to plan a route from where I was to the new dentists' office I was heading for.
My shiny new GPS from TomTomGo looked at me with a blank screen.
It was then that I figured out from doing a maps.google.com search on my smartphone that said address was in a new development and not likely on the map. A call to the dentist confirmed such (and they gave me the closest cross streets so that my GPS could at least get me close), and after fiddling around with trying to find "plot route to cross-streets x and y" on the menu screen (it was somewhat hidden), I headed out for the dentist.
The dentist listened to my description of the issue ("I have a cracked upper right bicuspid that hurts like the dickens and probably has some decay if not a full-fledged cavity, and the first molar behind it is the location of a 30+ year old filling that I already know has lost a piece recently; please check and do something about one or both of these problems if you can..."), then ordered x-rays. X-rays of my jaw revealed...
...nothing. No cavity. No fractured tooth. No broken filling.
I swore to her it was there--I could feel the fracture with my tongue, and I could feel the divot in the filling.
She took another x-ray that showed nothing. Finally, she decided to go in and take a look for herself. "This," she said after looking at my teeth, "is why doctors are supposed to treat the patient and not the x-ray. You're right--you have a long crack down the edge of your bicuspid. And you're missing a piece of filling." She poked around a little more. "And it looks like you have a tiny bit of decay on both teeth, but it's superficial decay that I should be able to just scrape off. This shouldn't be painful." She poked around with a probe.
I let out a "ow" as she hit the gumline between the two teeth.
"There's no decay down that low," she noted. But she put the probe into the gap between the teeth anyway.
I let out a scream of pain.
"Aha," she said as she checked the point on her probe. "It's not a cavity. It's worse. You have a periodontal abscess. Probably at one point when the bicuspid cracked, it left a small enough gap by the tooth to allow food to get down below the gumline. That's when the abscess developed. That's why your teeth hurt. That's why the bicuspid feels loose--it literally is, because the gums are being pushed apart by this abscess. That's also why, once you wiggle it around a little, the pain subsides, because you're relieving pressure on the tooth from the infection."
Fortunately, this was fixable. Two shots of novacaine later (and I have to hand it to her; she used the "redirected pain" trick of pinching me painfully on the inside of the cheek so that I was distracted from the needle going in), she had scraped off the decay, power-washed the abscess, cleaned it with disinfectant, and gave the entire area one last power-wash before pronouncing that she would be sending me home w/ penicillin and Tylenol #3. "I can't seal your teeth now because of the infection in your jaw--until that's cured, you'll just have to eat carefully for a few days. The pain should go away tomorrow once you've had a day of antibiotics. I'll see you in 3 weeks and then we'll set up a treatment schedule."
So, seven days after my layoff, NoVA is still causing me pain. ;)
Oh, well. Life goes on.
Or, at least, across the street.
I met up w/ four former co-workers for lunch at Potbelly's in the Dulles 28 Centre, the newest open-air mall going up in NoVA. Ostensibly, I was there to pick up a handful of things I'd left behind in the office because my car was full, but it was a great time to both talk about the layoff (I hadn't really had a chance to talk to any of them) and find out how life is going in the new AOL (answer: Not well; two co-workers were jealous of a third because the third had at least gotten a new set of tasks from his management, while most everyone else is still marching forward with their heads down trying not to look at all the empty cubicles as they soldier on; the fourth was thanking his lucky stars that the former sh-t position of "Marketing" had suddenly become THE place to be in the new ad-dominated AOL). All too quickly, one co-worker had to run off to a 1300 meeting, and after a bit more chatting, I had to split for a 1445 dentist appointment with Virginia Laser Dental, one of the new breed of "Sedation Dentistry" practitioners who numb you up for practically every procedure and make the numbing either practically painless or completely so. (I've been fighting what I was certain was a growing cavity on either a cracked tooth or the molar behind it, which I knew possessed a cracked filling, and I had no desire to be in hideous pain while the dentist figured it out.)
Fortunately, one of the boxes my co-workers brought me contained the new GPS I'd ordered and had delivered to my office (before I left, I cornered John from the mailroom and told him to deliver anything that arrived for me over the next week or so to my former officemate, who was consolidating it with the stuff left behind for later pickup), so I plugged it in, fired it up, answered its default questions, and then told it to plan a route from where I was to the new dentists' office I was heading for.
My shiny new GPS from TomTomGo looked at me with a blank screen.
It was then that I figured out from doing a maps.google.com search on my smartphone that said address was in a new development and not likely on the map. A call to the dentist confirmed such (and they gave me the closest cross streets so that my GPS could at least get me close), and after fiddling around with trying to find "plot route to cross-streets x and y" on the menu screen (it was somewhat hidden), I headed out for the dentist.
The dentist listened to my description of the issue ("I have a cracked upper right bicuspid that hurts like the dickens and probably has some decay if not a full-fledged cavity, and the first molar behind it is the location of a 30+ year old filling that I already know has lost a piece recently; please check and do something about one or both of these problems if you can..."), then ordered x-rays. X-rays of my jaw revealed...
...nothing. No cavity. No fractured tooth. No broken filling.
I swore to her it was there--I could feel the fracture with my tongue, and I could feel the divot in the filling.
She took another x-ray that showed nothing. Finally, she decided to go in and take a look for herself. "This," she said after looking at my teeth, "is why doctors are supposed to treat the patient and not the x-ray. You're right--you have a long crack down the edge of your bicuspid. And you're missing a piece of filling." She poked around a little more. "And it looks like you have a tiny bit of decay on both teeth, but it's superficial decay that I should be able to just scrape off. This shouldn't be painful." She poked around with a probe.
I let out a "ow" as she hit the gumline between the two teeth.
"There's no decay down that low," she noted. But she put the probe into the gap between the teeth anyway.
I let out a scream of pain.
"Aha," she said as she checked the point on her probe. "It's not a cavity. It's worse. You have a periodontal abscess. Probably at one point when the bicuspid cracked, it left a small enough gap by the tooth to allow food to get down below the gumline. That's when the abscess developed. That's why your teeth hurt. That's why the bicuspid feels loose--it literally is, because the gums are being pushed apart by this abscess. That's also why, once you wiggle it around a little, the pain subsides, because you're relieving pressure on the tooth from the infection."
Fortunately, this was fixable. Two shots of novacaine later (and I have to hand it to her; she used the "redirected pain" trick of pinching me painfully on the inside of the cheek so that I was distracted from the needle going in), she had scraped off the decay, power-washed the abscess, cleaned it with disinfectant, and gave the entire area one last power-wash before pronouncing that she would be sending me home w/ penicillin and Tylenol #3. "I can't seal your teeth now because of the infection in your jaw--until that's cured, you'll just have to eat carefully for a few days. The pain should go away tomorrow once you've had a day of antibiotics. I'll see you in 3 weeks and then we'll set up a treatment schedule."
So, seven days after my layoff, NoVA is still causing me pain. ;)
Oh, well. Life goes on.