Cheese...ugh, PIE PIE PIE

It was a dark and stormy night...actually it was a hot and dusty day, the day I was beaten and left for dead in the back of my helicopter...ok again, another exaggeration. But the other day as I was fooling around in the back of my chopper on the flight home for the day, I had a little accident and got smashed in the mouth with a big chunk of metal. After I got over that nauseating bright-flash feeling and noticed the unique “taste” that a sharp blow to the head brings to my taste buds, I felt all of the bits and pieces of shattered teeth in my mouth. Not cool!

I’ve punched plenty of others and been punched in the face a number of times on account of my being a friendly guy when I was younger, I credit those experiences for why I didn’t immediately act on my first instinct to spit all of the blood and pieces of teeth out on the dirty chopper floor. Instead, using my tongue I worked all of the pieces I could feel until they were tucked between my lip and my bum, and then spent the next 45 minutes or so feeling miserable and spitting blood into a plastic water bottle. I dumped the half-bottle of bloody mess out somewhere over the fabled old toilet of a town called Lashkar Gah.

But the story has a happy ending, one that gives me yet another reason to be grateful for the age that we all live in and my access to quality health care. I headed down to the dental clinic which is located in what outwardly appears to be a pathetic little sagging GP-medium tent. Inside, the young sergeant insisted that I had to be in real pain in order to be treated. After assuring her that I was indeed hurting, she went back and got the doc and within an hour or so, he had cemented all of the pieces together and stuck them back where they belong and I’m as good as new.

Now I’ve just got to get x-rayed once a year to make sure everything is still solid.

I’m a guy who loves to smile and laugh, it was just so weird for the short while that I was banged up to be so self conscious about either smiling or laughing. I guess for the sake of this painful little story having a moral, develop a bad attitude about work so that you won’t smile and expose your teeth so they can get knocked out.