Zub Tales

Well, it may not be more scratches to my car, but today’s news is equally obnoxious and going to cost me more money just the same.

Seems the my dental benefits at the college, since I now have dental with my expanded hours, don’t kick in until April 1st because of a waiting period they have attached to them. So the x-rays, yesterdays emergency evaluation and dental surgery will come right out of my pocket.

Fantastic.

Apparently I shouldn’t have even gotten up this week.

I had another dental appointment at 7:45am to get a special panoramic x-ray of my teeth to isolate the problems.

They gave me a copy to give to the specialist, which they’ll hopefully be able to get me in to see later today:

Impacted lower wisdom teeth. Upper wisdom teeth tearing into my gums as well. The white around the teeth represents the protective ‘good stuff’. Notice that both bottom circles show areas where the darker stuff goes right to the edge of the teeth – cavity goodness therein. The front teeth are all fine even if my scan makes them look dark, it’s just those wisdom and molar buggers causing me grief.

Looks like all four wisdoms gotta go and one of my molars will need either a cap or a root canal. That’s the effect of artist-quality lifestyle and ignorance right there, folks.

In the long run it’ll probably fix the odd bad breath bout and other teeth aches too.

More info when I know more. My work schedule will be hosed and pain killers will be my friend, but it’s gotta get done. Off to the college to do admin work and get as much lecturing done as I can before this dental roller coaster kicks into gear.

Thanks to everyone who posted or e-mailed well wishes after yesterday’s craziness.

I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried.

Leaving the college early in blinding jaw pain (see previous post), I stumbled to the car parking complex trying to think of what I could eat to tame the stomach beast that was going nuts. Walking towards my car, right before my eyes, a car pulls into the empty space beside mine at an angle that just looked ‘wrong’ and promptly scrapes the right-hand rear side of my car with a crunch and drag that echoes along the cement floors and walls. Right before my eyes! Today of all days!

I wasn’t even angry. The pain was so intense in my face that I just shook my head. The young girl driving looked at it aghast, looked at me to confirm that it was indeed my vehicle and then started shaking and quivering her lip ready to cry.

“My boyfriend’s gonna kill me. It’s his car.”

Looking closer, I was surprised that even with such an awful sound my car looked unharmed physically beyond scraped paint. We exchanged info and I told her I’d get a quote on the paint job. We’ll keep insurance companies out of this and just deal with it directly. Driving home, every heartbeat sent a ripple of pain through my gums. Mouth open, mouth closed, there’s no good position or relief.

Home now, choked down some soup and have an appointment at the dental office nearby for 6:30pm. Coverage or no, I need to at least find out what’s possible and get a prescription for some juicy pain killers until a surgery date or something. I’m having trouble reading e-mails or thinking straight as it throbs.

Wish me luck. Today’s apparently not my day.

Every year this happens, then it goes away eventually and I forget the pain. It started really badly again yesterday.

I’ve never gotten my wisdom teeth out and they’re throbbing again. Some years when I was freelancing I had the nerve to get them out but didn’t have a dental plan. Other years I had the coverage but didn’t have the nuts to get them taken out, opting for pain killers instead and waiting for it to subside.

One of the lower teeth is actually lying sideways with its roots heading up into my jaw. That one will hurt the most out of the four (it also hurts the most now) and has a slight chance of damaging the nerves in my jaw when it’s taken out. That scares me the most and has kept me from carrying through on the whole deal.

My new coverage is coming through at the college. Maybe I’ll step up to the plate and get it done this time. The idea of being knocked unconcious for the procedure seems quite appealing right now.

Even on Advil and Tylenol I could barely sleep last night and the numbing, pounding ache when I woke up this morning was excruciating. I’m sitting at my desk at the college answering e-mails with a dizzy haze of agony in my face. I look in the mirror and there seems to be minimal swelling I can see, but my face feels grotesque and bloated nonetheless. The bags under my eyes definitely don’t help the whole thing.

Seneca side of my day so far: Responding to application inqueries, refining portfolio requirements, summarizing curriculum material, building hand-outs for the students, rereading over theories I’ll be covering next week in class and assembling a budget “wish list” for September.

Udon side of my day so far: Following up on unpaid invoices, calling clients so we can schedule future projects, getting in touch with artists to schedule their time, getting printer templates for new products and planning convention material. Wondering what kind of curveballs the comic and RPG industry will throw me next.

Tonight, ideally, I turn my brain OFF. Heh.

I’ve been told Exalted #3 will be in stores February 8th. The proof looks spiffy. If you’ve liked the issues so far, this will not disappoint. It has 4 pages of Exalted interviews with the White Wolf staff and exclusive previews of the 2nd ed core book as well.

I’m also happy to report that the Exalted comic is now available in PDF format from Drive Thru RPG:
Exalted #0 Convention Exclusive
Exalted #1
Exalted #2

The Exalted 2nd edition RPG content from both the regular and powerfoil versions are included in each PDF. Download away, enjoy and then tell a friend.

Adding a bit to my previous post, the Filefront version of the Ahn’ Qiraj file’s been downloaded more than 34,000 times at this point and the Warcraft Movies mirror version has been downloaded over 7000 times. That’s pretty insane stuff for a 56 meg video game movie file and doesn’t even include the guilds who are apparently passing it around or hosting it on their sites. Madness.

Loosely tying into that, Monday’s just a good day for Jimbo exposure on the net because the second column in my new series at Newsarama also went up and the response has been very good overall. Thankfully the column is bi-weekly. With everything else going on I don’t think I could heap that on my plate weekly.

Tomorrow I start my 3 day teaching stint, getting into a better groove with my classes and riding out the rest of January hopefully a bit better than I entered into it.

The guild crew and I stayed up ridiculously late last night playing WoW so we could see a major event centered around something called the Gates of Ahn’ Qiraj. The server I play on was the first one in the world (out of the game’s 5 and a half million player base) to finish the gate opening quests.

Using Fraps I was able to get some decent footage of the event despite 7 server crashes and extremely bad frame rates at some points because of the thousands of players flooding towards specific locations to check it all out.

Here’s the video hosted on Filefront
Here’s the video hosted on Warcraft Movies
Here’s the video hosted at Google Video

…and now the event and my video has been Slashdotted.

Crazy.

I’m really glad I added in the Makeshift Miracle url at the ass end of the video as a free plug for my website. Looks like tens of thousands will be seeing that video today so hopefully some will trickle towards the site and enjoy it. 🙂

Go Wolves of Azeroth!

PS: Oh yeah, I’m playing World of Warcraft. I’ve never mentioned that here on my livejournal before. 😛

Not having cable to watch TV anymore can be quite liberating. Besides, any really good content will be available on DVD or online eventually.

Even if that content is really cool ads, like this one for a new TV.

What’s even more impressive/amusing is that they didn’t use any CG effects for it – just 200,000+ super bouncy balls down a San Francisco street.

The song used for it is quite calming and nice as well. Calming on a day like today is a big bonus 🙂