The night was as miserable as I thought that it would be, but I did get several hours of sleep here and there. Earlier in the evening, I'd been swallowing the ice water that I was using to soothe my tooth, and I realized that that was going to be a problem. Anyway, I called right at 07:30 and they told me to hustle on in. The dentist probed around a while and took an x-ray and did a pulp test, everything was borderline normal, and he decided that while there wasn't any abscess, there would be shortly, so he gave me an antibiotic... clindamycin, formulated especially for the bacteria that normally create abscesses in teeth. He told me that it was also pretty fast-acting, and it seemed to have taken the edge off the pain by lunch-time. Yeah, against my better judgement, I went in to work. Luckily, nobody crossed me, 'cause I was feeling pretty mean. We already had one tech off today, and we had a pretty heavy schedule. So I'm keeping on with the tylenol. The dentist was hot on Aleve, but that ramps up the old BP. I foolishly told him that I didn't want a narcotic, thinking of work... just plain not thinking, I guess. It would have been good to have more to squirrel away.... Karen was looking last night for some heavy-duty pain-killers that she'd been prescribed several years ago, before remembering that she'd given it away to one of her kids for some dumb reason or another.... Anyway, the afternoon was pretty good, busy as hell, if I was hurting I didn't really have time to think about it. I started having major pangs on the ride home, though, and half an hour later I was in pretty constant pain. If it's this bad in the morning, I'm gonna go back and get a broad-spectrum antibiotic to go with this dentally-specific one... and some narcotics. I've got two of the pills that I mentioned yesterday, now there's only one, hopefully that'll see me through the night. Other things that I want to talk about soon: politics and religion, but hopefully not both at once. Which reminds me of a bumper-sticker that I saw yesterday:The Last Time That We Mixed Religion and Government We Burned People at the Stake. Kinda says a whole bunch right there, heh. The other bumper sticker on the vehicle was My Other Vehicle Is A Broom. Not an atheist, heh? The driver was a pleasnat-looking younger woman, say 35 or so. I honked and gave her a thumbs-up in her rear-view mirror. Well, I actually took a sedative along with the pain pill, so I think that I'm off to la-la land now....