I DEFINITELY HAD ONE OF THOSE "I SHOULD HAVE STAYED IN BED" DAYS

I know that many people have experienced “one of those days” when they’ve felt they would have been better off just staying in bed because nothing they said or did turned out right.

Well, I definitely had one of those days two weeks ago.

First of all, at the start of the pandemic, right when the stay-at-home order first was issued, I cracked a filling in my bottom tooth. Of course, it just had to be one of the anchor teeth for my partial denture. I had to wait months for my dentist’s office to open again so I finally could make an appointment, which was scheduled for July 7th. I don’t have dental insurance, so I saved up the $300 for a new filling and was more than ready to get the tooth fixed.

An x-ray was taken as soon as I was seated in the dental chair, but I wasn’t concerned because the tooth wasn’t bothering me at all. Ten minutes later, the dentist entered the room and studied the x-ray. He then did what no one wants to see their dentist do…he shook his head and sighed, which never is a good sign.

“Well…you have only two options,” he finally said.  “Extract the tooth and get a new partial-denture made, or have a root canal and get a post and a crown.” 

Personally I didn’t like either option. I wanted a filling, not something that would cost me about a year’s salary, especially since I’m pretty sure the term “starving writer” was created solely for my benefit.

“Don’t you have any other options…like one for around $300?” I asked him.

 I couldn’t see his face through his mask, but I did hear him chuckle, which just about told me I'd probably have to apply for a sixth mortgage on the house.  

At that moment, however, something scary happened. Suddenly, my right ear, the ear that was facing the dentist, went completely deaf. I panicked, wondering what was going on. Had the x-ray contained some ear-damaging mutant radiation? Was my tooth pressing on a nerve to the ear? Even worse, I couldn’t hear a thing the dentist was explaining about my tooth... like the price. For all I knew, he also was reciting horror stories about how my entire jaw was going rot away if I didn’t have a root canal ASAP.

 I guess the dentist could tell by my sudden look of sheer terror that something was wrong. He asked if I was okay.

“I can’t hear you!” I shouted, hearing my own voice echoing inside my head. “My right ear has gone deaf!”

So he spoke louder. I could hear him, but he sounded as if he’d stuffed his mouth with marshmallows. From what I could gather, he was saying my tooth probably was infected and had caused an ear infection, which was blocking my ear. He said he was going to give me a prescription for something called Augmentin 875, a powerful antibiotic that would wipe out both problems, as well as any other hidden infections my body might have, just for good measure. He told me to take the medication for 10 days and in the meantime, decide what I wanted to do about my tooth.

Once I was back in my car, I started to think more seriously about the Augmentin 875, which sounded like some kind of experimental sci-fi drug I’d seen in movies that featured clones and three-eyed people. So I Googled it to get more information. Just about every side effect ever created, and even a few that hadn’t been yet, were listed. That’s when I thought it might be wise to head to an urgent-care clinic to have my ear checked out before I took any medication that might result in my spleen falling out.

Visiting the clinic was pretty stressful.  Before I even was allowed inside, I had to stay out in the parking lot and answer a lot of questions about my current state of health, and then have my temperature taken by people who looked as if they were members of a hazmat team...or the crew of the next mission to Mars. I actually felt vulnerable wearing nothing more protective than my cloth face-mask.

Eventually I was led to a small examining room, where I sat and waited all alone for 20 minutes. The longer I sat there, the more nervous I became. That’s because if there’s one thing I’ve learned about doctors, it’s that no matter what problem you see them for, they’ll inevitably also search for something else.

Example:  “Doctor, I think my big toenail is ingrown. It really hurts.”

Doctor:    “Okay, let’s check it out. By the way, when was the last time you had a colonoscopy?”

Anyway, as I sat and waited for someone to come check my ear, thoughts of everything from never being able to hear again to having a huge tumor blocking my ear-canal came to mind. By the time the assistant entered the room to take my blood pressure, it was through the roof  – 178/102.  Usually, my pressure is low.

“Your pressure is really high,” she said to me, fortunately standing on my left side so I could hear her. “You could be on the verge of having a stroke!”

“Oh, my pressure's usually really low,” I assured her.

”But it isn’t right now, is it?”  She then left the room.

So that gave me even more to worry about as I sat there alone once again. Suddenly my ear problem didn’t seem quite so urgent to me…at least not when I compared it to an impending stroke.

A doctor then entered the room and listened to my heart and lungs, looked up my nose and then down my throat.

“Did anyone ever tell you that you have a mild heart murmur?” she asked me.

I shook my head. “Is that because I’m about to have a stroke?”

She gave me a strange look and finally examined my ears. “Oh, wow,” she said.

Well, “Oh, wow,” even though it was said calmly, was about as panic-worthy as the dentist looking at my x-ray and shaking his head and sighing. I felt my blood pressure instantly shoot up at least another 30 points.

“Your right ear is completely plugged with impacted earwax,” she said.

Never had I been so relieved to have a cruddy ear.

My left ear, however, was totally clear, which made no sense at all. I mean, I always clean both of them exactly the same way.

“We happen to have a guy here who’s great at flushing out earwax,” she said. “I’ll send him right in.” In a flash, she was gone.

I assumed that my impending stroke and heart murmur suddenly weren’t quite as important as my backed-up earwax.

A young man armed with a pan, a spray hose, a towel and other assorted equipment soon entered. Once again, I felt panicky.

“Is this going to hurt?” I asked him.

“Some people think it feels good,” he said.

“Some” people wasn’t enough to suit me.  That meant that “some” people also thought it didn’t feel good.

He took my blood pressure. By then, my arm was beginning to go numb from all of the pressure-taking. But what I thought was weird about the way this guy took it was he told me to sit on the edge of the examining table and hang my arm straight down by my side. I’d always been told the arm should be fully supported and at heart level to give an accurate reading. With his method, my pressure was 180/100. That did it.  I was pretty sure I was about to drop dead with a water hose stuck in my ear.

The flushing of my ear, with nice warm water, actually felt good.  I had to hold the pan underneath it to catch the water and anything that might come out with it.

“You’ve got the Rock of Gibraltar stuck in there,” the guy said, checking my ear after the third try failed to dislodge anything. “But don’t worry, we’ll get it out.”

Visions of a stick of dynamite being shoved into my ear crossed my mind.

Suddenly, what sounded like rocks clunking into the pan started coming out of my ear.  And after each “clunk,” my hearing became clearer and louder.  When the guy showed the pan to me afterwards, it looked as if someone had been panning for gold with it.

My ear was rechecked and deemed “perfectly clear” and I was told I could leave.

“Then I don’t need any Augmentin 875?” I asked.

He gave me a puzzled look. “Why would you need that?”

At that point, I was glad I’d had my ear checked first and not taken the antibiotic.

By the time I got home, I felt as if I’d run a marathon. I was totally exhausted. The first thing I did was take my blood pressure – both with an arm cuff and then a wrist one. It was 114/63. The next thing I did was turn down the volume on the TV from 26 to 10.  Apparently the earwax problem had been affecting my hearing much longer than I’d realized.

To relax and unwind, I took a nice cool shower.  My shower stall has two sliding glass doors on it, but when I finished showering and attempted to slide the right door open to get out, it wouldn’t slide. I didn’t know it at the time, but it partially had popped off the track on top. So I shoved it harder. The door went flying completely off and fell backwards right into the shower...and right on top of me.

Luckily, the door didn’t break (and as far as I could tell, neither did I) but it was pretty heavy, so I had to struggle to lift it off myself. Once again, I had visions of my dead body being found – this time, naked and with a shower door lying on top of it. Believe me, it wasn’t a pretty sight.

After the day I’d had, I actually was too afraid to do anything else, not even cook dinner, because I was pretty sure I’d end up setting the house on fire. So I let the dogs out, then fed them and said, “You have my permission to pee or poop anywhere you’d like! I’m going to bed!”

 And I stayed there for 13 hours.

A week later, I underwent the root canal procedure, and one of my dogs had her annual physical exam on the same day.  In retrospect, I definitely should have stayed home in bed on that day, too...and I'm pretty sure my poor dog wishes she had done the same thing.

But that’s a whole other story.

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Sally Breslin is an award-winning syndicated humor columnist and the author of “There’s a Tick in my Underwear!” “Heed the Predictor” and “The Common-Sense Approach to Dream Interpretation." Contact her at: sillysally@att.net