dianaschnuth

I haven’t been to a dentist in… *counting on fingers* …probably five or six years.

When I did go last time, it was in Parma (where my family no longer lives), and I had several visits’ worth of very deep cleaning. My gums hurt like a bitch for the next couple of days, but I actually felt a lot better about myself afterward. I was even OK with letting loose a big, toothy smile every now and then (even though my teeth are still crooked).

I kept up with my “tooth maintenance” pretty well for a couple years. Brush twice a day, use those crazy orange Stimudent sticks, floss (sometimes), and swish the mouthwash around. It was a pain when I still lived in the dorms and had to cart all my tooth maintenance sundries down to the bathroom, halfway to the other end of the wing. But I digress.

After a while, my tooth maintenance fell by the wayside, and I returned to my old habits. Suffice to say that, if I’m running late in the morning, I’d rather spend two minutes throwing together my lunch than brushing my teeth. My only saving grace at this point is two years of the Atkins diet: no refined sugar. Or, rather, very little — I won’t pretend I don’t ever cheat and buy a cookie or a Frappucino out of the vending machine.

So, from what I can tell (and I’m admittedly not a dental professional), I have much less plaque than I had before. I’ve still got tartar, though, and it’s pretty gross. See, my bottom front teeth are very, VERY unstraight — one grew in almost entirely behind the others, so only one-third of the middle of the tooth is actually showing. Someday it would be cool to have my teeth fixed, I think. Aaron thinks otherwise, since he had braces when he was a kid and didn’t take kindly to it. But, again, I digress.

Here’s the entire reason for this blog entry.

I was in the bathroom just now, examining my bottom front teeth, and being understandably grossed out by the amount of tartar buildup behind the teeth. They all come together in funky ways, and the tartar tends to fill in the cracks where they’re crooked and don’t meet the way they should. It’s weird. Anyway, I stuck a finger in my mouth to pick at it, maybe see how thick the layer of tartar was—

And a piece of tartar CAME OFF.

OMG gross.

What was grosser was that its absence left a weird depression/hole in the normal profile of the back of my teeth. Also, where the tartar had been encroaching on my gums, they were much redder than the rest of my gums. That was also pretty gross. I stood there in the bathroom with an extra pair of tweezers, peering into the mirror and trying to pick off the rest of the chalky tartar behind my teeth.

And I thought to myself, “If Aaron were here, I’d just show him. As it is, I’m probably going to blog this.”

Anybody in the Toledo area know a good dentist or dental hygenist?

…

Some complete stranger is going to find this blog entry and comment on my hygiene like this person commented on my lack of style. Heh. I’ll try not to be offended.

The first floor women’s restroom at my work has three stalls. This is not usually a problem, as we don’t all have to go at the same time, so three stalls are sufficient.

However, the middle stall has been out of order this week.

Incidentally, the middle stall is everyone’s favorite. The stall closest to the door is the handicapped stall, which our resident wheelchair-bound employee mocked openly as being entirely too small to fit a wheelchair into. (Another single-person restroom was constructed for her use.) The stall farthest from the door is awkward, as the toilet is slightly off-center, so the user has to check between her knees before sitting to ensure that the target is, in fact, locked-on.

The broken middle stall caused a minor traffic-flow problem around lunchtime, when a group of women attending some sort of training session at our building swarmed the restroom. This required me to wait in a five-person-deep line for my turn to pee. Five minutes of my life wasted; not that big of a deal, I guess.

The broken stall caused a problem of a wholly different sort later this afternoon, as the toilet-choking load of shit still in the bowl began to smell. Bad. I dislike spending a short amount of time in a wretched-smelling bathroom considerably more than I dislike spending a lengthy amount of time in a normal-smelling one.

The odor wasn’t bad enough to induce gagging, but it was very unpleasant. Just knowing that someone’s shit was festering and fermenting behind that closed door was disturbing enough.

Update, 4:15pm: Someone finally made the stinky load go down the hole, but the john is still faintly redolent of shit, and the middle stall is still marked out of order.