gold diggin' [Part One]

So recently, I had a traumatic experience at the dentist. What should have been the easiest appointment to cement a crown ended up involving a visit to the campus health center and returning from the appointment crown-less (or so to speak).

You see, during the fitting of my expensive GOLD crown onto my tooth, I made a mistake: I swallowed it. In a matter of seconds, the crown went from my friend K's (or dentist's) hand down into the rabbit hole. As I felt the presence of a foreign object about to pass down my throat, I lept from the chair and dug my fingers down my throat in hopes of retrieving the disobedient crown. What followed was a bloody throat, a blood nose and the painful realization that maybe this crown had slipped away. Having been rushed to the restroom, I stood over the sink as my friend M passed me stashes of paper towels to replace the ones soaked with my blood.

I didn't really know what was happening, but somehow I ended up on my knees on the cold tile floor. My poor friend M didn't know what to do either, so she just kept passing me paper towels. As for my poor traumatized dentist friend K, I just remember seeing his face go ashen as he stammered to figure out what to do next. What followed was a lengthy visit to the student health center, where an X-ray assured all three of us that my crown had reached my colon. The doctor told me that it should pass in 3 to 4 days...

Once at home, I considered my options: 1. Forget about it and figure out how to pay another $260 for another one; or 2. Start digging.

You see, being a poor grad student, I really didn't have an option with #1... which left me with disgusting option #2.

To be continued...