Dear god! Is that a tooth in your hand?

Why no, it's not a tooth, but that's an excellent guess. Not even I have reached the level where my teeth just randomly fall out of my mouth. It is, however, a crown. And while I was told that the crown was temporary - never meant to stay in my head for more than a few weeks - I was also told that it would stay in my head until the next time that I went to the dentist. And friends, as you can tell from the picture, I was lied to.

The crown in question is a temporary that had been in my mouth for three weeks when I went to the dentist on Tuesday. Its time with me was supposed to be coming to an end, but there was a problem with the permanent one, so back went the temp. Also entering my mouth on Tuesday was a filling and another temporary crown. I was told not to eat sticky things and not to floss the temporaries, and then I was sent on my merry way after a mere three hours of dental hijinks. (Yes, you read that right -three freaking hours. Also, the hygienist said I have fat cheeks, leaving me with the opening to say "They were a hell of a lot thinner before your incompetent ass stuck the suction thingie to them for an hour and a half," though I didn't. But I digress.) So Wednesday morning, while I was eating oatmeal (oatmeal, a food safe for infants and the elderly, but apparently not for me), my tooth hit something, and it was my crown.

After I spent a moment feeling with my tongue to see which of my many dental implants I had lost and establishing that I was not in pain, and after crying the type of hysterical weeping that comes naturally upon realizing that somebody up there really does hate you, I finished my breakfast and called the dentist's office. And after another hour spent there (that makes four hours there this week, for those of you keeping score), all of my teeth, real and fake, are back where they belong. But seriously. Do any of you out there have anywhere near this degree of tooth problems? Because at this point, when I tell people at work, they just say (or at least I can see them thinking), "You had to go to the dentist again? Do you ever brush your teeth?" And even though I know for a fact that I brush and floss twice a day, and even though I have cried plenty of real, honest-to-goodness tears about the genetic curse that is my mouth, it makes me want to cry some more.