The Tooth Bandit...

Barry-Harvey-Mel

About 5 and 1/2 years ago, I was laying on an operating table and a guy wearing a mask took a scalpel and sliced 9 inches down the center off my chest. Then he took a dremel and sawed my breast bone in half, withdrew my beating heat, stopped it and performed a triple bypass on it, but only after patching the large gaping hole that another untalented doctor accidentally poked in it, during an angiogram. They wired my ribs back together and sewed up the obnoxious wound and I'm still not sure that's any worse than how I feel about going to my dentist's appointment tomorrow afternoon.

That nagging, obnoxious, annoying, irritable, jagged, tooth will not give me a break. The worse part is over and the swelling is down, but it's still way over sensitive for a molar that's hardly ever asked to do anything. The truth is, there are no teeth living downstairs of it, so I find it futile to ask it to perform any tasks. It's downstairs neighbors were evicted many years ago when some unknown dentist in Scottsdale declared then unfit for active duty. I labor about losing the tooth primarily because we've become attached to one another in a very intimate fashion. I know that new guy tomorrow is going to look over his glasses and while hiding behind his mask of anonymity, give me that death sentence frown and the old tooth with be history.



On another front and another coast, I got a call from Barry tonight, telling me he had some bad news. Barry is my friend of 55 years, that has been stricken with terminal cancer and when he calls and says he's got bad news, I freak the hell out! Although his news was bad, it wasn't about him. Our other friend Harvey in Connecticut, went to the doctor today suffering from shortness of breath. Harvey is the guy in the center of the picture that looks like he may have gained a lot of weight in the last few years and I mean like 75 lbs, maybe even more? The doctor performed a stress test and stopped him in the middle and did an angiogram. He sent him directly to the hospital for open heart surgery to replace at least 3 veins that are severely blocked. Barry says he's scared shitless and doesn't want to talk to anyone, who would blame him? He'd probably trade places with me in a minute and choose the dentist! Tonight I'll be praying for his quick recovery and a great outcome.