Day 18.
My recovery journey is starting to sound like I was lost at sea. My dry mouth in the mornings doesn’t prove otherwise. I could pass as a victim of scurvy.
Recovery continues to be awful. I pretty much look like myself again unless I open my mouth. There is a small scar on my upper lip, under my left nostril. It’s noticeable but not horrible to look at. I can live with it.
Google’s algorithms believe I want to read about cycling accidents. According to Google, I crave videos of cars plowing into cyclists. When I opened my photo album, one of the AI-created featured albums was Best of July 2018.
The cover photo was from a cycling accident.
(Here’s the post about that accident.)
It is disconcerting.
I received the dental flipper today. It is different from what I envisioned. Rather than look like a metal retainer with a floating fake tooth, it’s a transparent mouth guard with teeth-coloured plastic in one of the pockets. Unlike my porcelain crowns, handcrafted in Italy by the finest tooth artisans, this flipper is a Temu equivalent dental product.
It reinforces my fragile teeth and gives me some relief. Wearing a mouthguard full-time is more comfortable than airing out my naked teeth. It doesn’t look good, but it is an improvement. This new technology still wows me. The amount printed on the insurance billing forms was $375. Even the excision of the traumatic fibroma from my lower lip cost more.
My dental bill is almost $1,000 already. The front desk staff at the dentist’s office deals with the insurance companies, so I don’t have to deal with… even more insurance paperwork. I still think it’s weird that I had to get one of these forms notarized. The next one they send, I’ll have to get baptized.
I had to take an ice cream break after that paragraph. Ice cream has brought me delicious, chocolatey pain relief. Ice cream is better than Tylenol: you read it here!
We can also take a visual break:
Zoée operates a flower stand in Vancouver. They did the next best thing and scheduled bimonthly bouquet deliveries from a local flower stand operator until the end of September. Then, it becomes infinite bimonthly ice cream deliveries! (That was a joke, but I am open to an ice cream subscription.)
Besides that, gore has become an integral part of my life now that I play Hades. In the game, Hades is my father, and I’m trying to run away from the underworld, where they make me do tedious clerical duties for an eternity. It makes sense that this character is ripped: he fights a lot and gets loads of cardio in dashing away from enemies’ attacks.
I wasn’t sure I’d like a game like this, as there’s nothing cute about it—even Cerberus isn’t cute. However, the character interactions and gameplay more than make up for it. I don’t want to spoil it for any gamer who hasn’t tried this game, although I appear among the last gamers to discover Hades.
On the contrary, Animal Crossing serves up a healthy helping of cute. It’s like The Sims for Christians. Even the word “therapist” has been banned in the game. I can’t believe the game is as popular as it is, yet I’m still playing it.
That heathen, Jordi, is pulling me deeper into the world of gaming. He brought me to his friends’ place, where four of us played video games the entire time. Video games are a fun and inclusive way for me to socialize with a group of hearing people.
Day 19.
I gave in to the temptation to play Hades after starting on this post yesterday.
When I was tired of battling creatures of the underworld–and just plain tired–I realized my nightly struggle to sleep with my mouth closed had been exacerbated by the addition of the flipper. I can’t close my jaw properly and my scarred lips make it even more difficult to close my lips while relaxing my jaw. My solution was to pull out a roll of kinesiology tape that had been untouched since my bygone era of knee pain. I trimmed two small strips from the roll and taped my lips shut, allowing me to sleep with a relaxed jaw without waking up with a parched white tongue.
Now to wrap up this post with tidbits of gratitude:
- I have discovered cashew-based ice cream and it is even better than lactose-free ice cream.
- Today’s weather was perfection. Just as well–I had to walk 14km today.
- I think the radishes in my garden have become too old to eat (not that radishes work in smoothies); however, the shoots have flowered! They’re pretty AND edible, even for me.
- My new self-care routine of massaging shea butter on my legs.
- BEES!
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