All that happened on my second morning in Chicago. Jo and the kids hadn't yet arrived - so our vacation hadn't even started. I bought a bottle of Advil at the Walgreens (there are more Walgreens per square inch of downtown Chicago than anything else). I panicked when I realized that four Advils every six hours wasn't doing the trick. That night I looked at the hotel bed side clock about every 15 minutes, waiting pitifully for five or six hours to pass so I could snarf down more Advil.
On Tuesday morning, three days later and less that 9 hours after being back in Austin I was in my dentist's chair. He took one look and gave me a referral to a doctor he considered Austin's best endodontist (I had to wikipedia that word - a dentist who specializes in the treatment of the tooth pulp).
Another 24 hours later the left side of my face was numb and two faces were peering at me, one of them through a binocular microscope. A normal procedure at a dentist - which is one of the miracles of modern medicine - felt like someone stomping his foot outside while the Bolshoi played inside. This guy must have at times switched instruments 10 times a minute and many were tiny needles held by forceps. An hour later he said he was done and showed me the before and after x-rays. My face and head felt better already.
What would I have done a mere hundred years ago*? Probably tried to rip my head off. Or jump off a tree. While it's great to know what happened an instant after the Big Bang I suddenly find myself grateful to applied science. And angry at those that oppose science because they feel religiously inferior.
*or if I didn't have a thousand bucks to blow or I couldn't get access to the procedure for so many other reasons
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