Remember many months back when I experienced vicious savage tooth pain after a dentist's visit, and I called them to wail and they didn't call me back and I ranted about it here and everyone was very comforting and told me to give them a massive telling-off and find a new dentist?

Well, two things about that.

1) It turns out they'd called me back within 24 hours with a very concerned message to get in touch with them right away and they'd do what they could for me. But for some reason, my cell-phone service provider didn't actually deliver that voicemail message to me for more than a week. (I've had that problem a couple times now.) It just turned up randomly in my voicemail inbox one day. By that time, of course, the pain was gone and I'd moved on with my life.

2) Turns out that was the pain of the nerve dying in the tooth, possibly (my dentist thinks) from the trauma of him drilling out the way-old filling in that tooth and replacing it. Unfortunately, that left space for an infection, which is now manifesting in the form of this entirely gross lesion-like thing on my gums. Diagnosis: root canal needed. My first. Bleah.

None of which is of much interest to anyone but me and my insurance company, except that seanan_mcguire just posted this hilarious dialogue. (insidian, if you missed the entry title or didn't believe me or decided to brave it anyway, this is your last chance. Seriously, stop now.) Her musings on revenge via bed-full-of-spiders reminded me of Cass and me talking on the drive back from the dentist, like so:

Me: So it turns out this thing in my mouth is — this is really gross, honestly. Way grosser than I thought.

Cass: Embedded spider eggs?

Me: [Long pause.] Okay, I said grosser than I thought, not the grossest thing imaginable.

Cass: Sorry.

Me: Though now that I think about it, the treatment for a mouthful of spider eggs is probably better than the actual treatment that I'm facing already. I think with spider eggs, they advise you to just let them hatch. There are many advantages to a mouthful of spiders. They're protein-rich. You can spit them at people defensively. They can eat any stray insects that somehow wind up in your mouth.

Cass: They can teach you to spell, and sing songs with you.

Me: And save you from death and tell everybody you're "terrific" and "some pig." Man, I really wish I had a mouthful of baby spiders about now.

I'm-a feelin': disgusted