Back in January (like 2 days after the new year, when I was still on the island, not taking the ferry back because we didn't want to wait in a line all day) I broke one of my molars on some churrasco salt. It was kind of a freak accident and actually I think it had been broken for a while, since it was sensitive to hot and cold for a couple of years, or had had a hairline crack or something, and the salt probably did it in. It took me a while to figure out that it was really BROKEN, so it was only about a week later that we called the dentist to figure out what to do. My dentist was booked up until after Carnaval, so I made a quick visit to one of my husband's student's offices and she put some putty in the hole and took out the broken piece so I could at least drink liquids without pain. About a week later, she squeezed me in between some appointments and put in a temporary fill with some semi-hard putty, and took an x-ray of the tooth.

Two weeks after that, still having pain, there was an opening for my dentist and I went with all the info from the previous dentist to see if I could have it fixed for real. She took another x-ray and decided it would be best to do a root canal and then a crown. But she doesn't do root canals. So off I went to a friend of her's office who does to make an appointment to do the root canal. This friend didn't have room for another two weeks. So two weeks later, I did half the root canal, but she didn't have time to finish before the next patient, so I had to come back again two weeks after that. Now that it was done, I could finally go to my dentist and do the crown. I made the appointment and was able to get in about a month after the root canal was finished. She took the mold of my teeth to send to the lab to make the crown and prepped the tooth, but I had to make an appointment for two weeks later so that she could request that my dental plan liberate this procedure. This was on Wednesday of this week.

Then yesterday I got an "emergency" call when I got home from my dentist's assistant telling me that there was something wrong with the mold for the top teeth and could I please come in and do it again right now because my dentist was going to travel for the holiday and the whole thing would be delayed by a week if it didn't get done. So I left directly from my water bike class (still wet, having no towel), amazingly got a bus that took me to Itaigara (a mall near her office) and rushed up to do the mold again.

I was in a hurry to get home and liberate my nanny (who has already stayed later three days this week because of all this mess), so when I missed one bus (Campo Grande R1) and the second one wouldn't let me on and I saw the state of the complete gridlock traffic of rush hour, I just decided to walk home. It's not that far of a walk (about 25 minutes) and there were plenty of people out and about. On the way I passed a guy dressed in rags and his shopping cart full of cardboard listening to an MP3 player, eyes shut, bobbing his head to the music. On another street I encountered a pair of shoes, one partially broken, left sitting neatly together near a wall for anyone who might want them. And as I was almost home, I was nearly run over by none other than the bus (Campo Grande R1) that I had missed back at the mall. So all in all, I didn't loose any time by walking, and in fact saved myself R$2.