Last year I was on a plane coming back from LA, Jet Blue, just like two days ago when again, I was returning from the West Coast. Last year it was to try and save a second season of Starved, which unfortunately, on a "pit stop" in Long Beech to get more fuel (I love Jet Blue but they pull shit like this. Apparently with the wind as it was in Burbank, they didn't have enough runway to take off with if the plane was as heavy as it needed to be with enough fuel to get us to NYC so they dumped some there, took off and then we stopped in Long Beach to get enough to make it across the country) I found out hadn't happened and we were canceled.

My face had been hurting for a couple weeks and I had hoped it was a virus or sinus infection or something and was taking antibiotics. I got off the place and went straight to the dentist, hoping against hope it had nothing to do with that as I would rather literally eat shit than have to go there ever. I fucking hate the dentist. Wait, I'm sorry, let's start reframing it and let's start reframing it now. I love the dentist. He took an x-ray and it was obvious and clear.

"You need a root canal." I employed every skill of getting around this I had. My devotion to this made my getting the quarters from the evil bank in LA look like child's play but in the end, I had to get the root canal or risk losing ALL MY TEETH one day as the infection would systematically spread through my face. I went straight to the specialist on 57th street and 7th. Doctor Adams. I go the opposite way immediately when I do lose and want the pain over NOW so I can begin winning again.

He walked into the office, took one look at me and his face lit up big, "Oh my God! My wife and I LOVE your show! It's our favorite night of the week. We get ice cream and jump in bed and watch your show!" "Great thanks. It got canceled 5 hours ago and now you're gonna do a root canal on me, shut the fuck up cunt and start murdering me." I didn't say that. "Thank you so much. You're very kind. Unfortunately it was just canceled," I said sincerely, he was a nice man.

So cut to yesterday. I fly back from LA, again having tried to sell a TV show, this time one based on my book that's coming out in May with the same title as this blog, again, with a hurting face. I again go straight to Dentist Adams, again hoping against hope that it's anything other than something to do with my teeth. The same tooth he fixed last year. And I haven't heard anything but passes from every network I had pitched in LA. There's only one left to hear from, the one I would most like to be at since I could go the farthest with content there and they are doing the edgiest stuff, Showtime.

"Yeah, you didn't heal from the root canal last year so there's a cyst there and we have to cut it out, scrape your gums and close you back up. It's nothing. You'll be out of here in an hour."

"Uh-huh. Okay, yeah. No. I don't want that. I might suggest an alternative. If it's all the same to you, I would prefer if your nice young blonde Polish assistant sucked my cock instead please and then spoon feed me chocolate cake and vanilla ice cream while I watch the Mets clinch the East on my couch at home." I didn't say that. But I did, of course, launch an epic battle to get around his idea of killing me. Again, if he didn't do the procedure, I would end up with NO TEETH after the infection spread. It had to happen. He numbed me up and sent me back in the chair. Like parents with their little kids, dentists can somehow understand your mauled half sentence gibberish English with cotton stuffed in your mouth like no one else.

"IIii tha ana cha dat da cy cou we cancer?"

"In 23 years I've never seen the cyst come back as anything other than what I know this one is. Infected tissue. Don't worry."

"Oo, no ay."

"No way."

"Oo or."

"For sure."

I had been dreading this fucking thing for so long but was glad at least it would be over soon. After "probing" my gum area but before he began he sat me up and said. "I have bad news. I don't think I'm going to have to do the surgery."

"What are you, a fucking comedian?!" I didn't say that. "Great. You can fix it without it?"

"No, it's worse than I thought and I don't think surgery will help. You have no bone attached to the tooth. It probably has to come out or be bone grafted which we take from your palate or..."

I didn't hear anything else he was saying as the blood rushed out of my head and I wanted to vomit my heart out of my ass. It had gotten WORSE?! Fuck me! I begged him to do the surgery and we'd hope for the "miracle" that my body would grow new bone. Anything to avoid the ordeal that was the other unspeakable option. He agreed. I was in the fucking chair now, do something!

As I lied back singing Krishna Das yoga Kirtans in my head to calm myself and he scraped my face away under my gums, I imagined that I was the one in a trillion who's cyst was in fact cancerous and it had spread into my brain and I had a month to live. In the space of an hour I had gone from being terrified of the scraping and then the idea of getting a tooth pulled, to praying to sweet Jesus that I could not die from brain cancer and be able to only have it be a tooth that got pulled.

Life is all perceptive. The lower the expectations, the better chance I have of having a sublime day. How I'm not jumping up and down with sheer joy at being able to take a single breath, hugging every fellow human in sight, tears streaming down my face with the abject, profound joy of the air hitting my face as I walk, being able to have two legs that can propel my living body down the street in this instant is a wonder.

Every day you wake up and don't need a root canal is a day you have no business not feeling is the happiest day of your life. And if God told me I had one day left and on that day I had to have a root canal, I'd be fucking overjoyed.

Because I love root canals.

Posted by Eric Schaeffer at 2:57 PM

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