Diary: crown prep

Eight minutes and twenty seconds ago I was sitting on the couch, fidgeting and waiting for the right moment to leave.

Now I'm walking down the road towards the dentist. I'm going for crown preparation - always unpleasant. I'm a bit spaced out, to be frank.

I see a man walking 15 yards in front of me: same age, same clothes, same appearance. I think: "It's almost like I'm looking at my future self ten seconds time."

I make a note of where he passes. Ten seconds later I pass that very same spot. I think: "I'm now my future self."

I look at the sun, a vague ball through scudding clouds. I'm seeing the sun in its past, eight minutes and twenty seconds ago.

"Hello sun," I think, "You seem pretty solid for an object existing at the same time as I was fidgeting on the couch." I guess my former self is as real as the sun.

My crown prep will take 50 minutes. As I approach the dentist, I imagine my future self passing me in the other direction, on the way home, the ordeal complete. That future self exists just as much as I do right now, entering the surgery. But just elsewhen.

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My new dentist is a young Polish woman, mid-twenties, with a brisk no-nonsense style. I'm guessing INTJ - she's usefully keen on explanation. She looks like an alien in her smock, full-face mask, cap, magnifying goggles and blinding-white forehead LED.

She's good with the injection, though; slow and gentle. I say how much I appreciate a dentist with empathy. The two of them giggle.

Then it's twenty minutes of electric drill whining in my mouth. The top-left molar is being ground down, shaped, flattened. I don't feel much - it's just stressing.

The really uncomfortable part is the mould, which feels like a length of squiggy plasticine cupped in a long, thin plastic container whose edge bites into my cheek.

"Bite hard and hold," she says. The two or three minutes is painful and interminable.

The final part, where she glues a temporary crown, is relatively uneventful. I have to come back in two weeks to have the real thing fitted.

"Don't worry if it comes off," are her final words.

I leave the dentist, start to walk home. 'Oh yes', I think, 'I'm now that future self I was so busy inferring but couldn't actually see 50 minutes ago.' *

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The temporary crown survived dinner and even flossing, but split in two and detached on encountering a xylitol chewing gum.

There's a little sensitive area at the back which is forcing me to bite on the right. But it's pointless getting a new temporary crown - it would never survive.

Two weeks.

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* I wrote about this (more correctly!) here .. the physicist's view as expressed by Einstein. You can see that my musings were all just a coping mechanism!