So I’m eating leftover chicken vindaloo for lunch and I bite down on something hard. Take it out, and it looks like…a tooth? Or a piece of a tooth? It was rounded and smooth and toothy-looking on one side, and broken-off flat on the other. About the size and shape of a pea cut in half.
Of course, I obsessively ran my tongue over every tooth several times over, seeing if I had any missing teeth, missing parts of teeth, missing crowns…all seemed good. I’m still checking every now and then just to make sure.
I’m going to assume it was a bit of bone, even though I used cut-up boneless chicken breasts in the curry. I don’t want to contemplate the alternative…someone else’s tooth?
This reminded me of the time I was on a short road trip. I stopped at a Holiday gas station to fill up and when paying noticed a bin of warm roasted cashews on the counter. They looked delicious! So because when you’re on a road trip you must eat lots of snack foods, I bought a bag. And they were so good - warm and salty. Luckily, I just happened to look down at one point and noticed something odd in the bag. I pulled it out. It was an actual rotted human (?) molar! I say rotted because it looked like it had cavities in it.
One Saturday afternoon years ago Mrs. solost had gone somewhere with the kids, so I had a rare ‘me’ day. I made popcorn and settled in to watch a movie. I bit down on an unpopped kernel right on a molar that was compromised with a deep filling. The molar basically disintegrated.
My ‘me’ day turned into an emergency trip to the dentist
Thanks for the Far Side cartoon, and nice username for this thread
Just to throw another weird possibility out there: I once jabbed my gum with the corner of the toothbrush and got a nasty little sore or ulcer there. It wasn’t healing and kept hurting for quite a few days. Then I noticed it had a smooth white head to it. I watched this for a while, and tried touching it but it was quite painful to touch. Eventually I poked a bit harder at it, and it fell off. It was “a piece of a tooth? It was rounded and smooth and toothy-looking on one side, and broken-off flat on the other. About the size and shape of a pea cut in half.”
Being the sort that would have a microscope at home, I looked at it under the microscope. The convex side was smooth and shiny and hard. The other side was rough and looked a bit like a break through a frozen sponge, kind of a cross section through foam, and also hard.
The sore healed pretty quickly after that. I did some investigating. Turns out it was very probably a bit of my jawbone. Wounds through gum that irritate the bone can cause a chunk of it to flake away and kind of migrate to the surface. It sounded like some kind of sacrificial healing mechanism, like the bone would rather discard a wounded bit than try to make it healthy again.
I was eating ice cream we got at a shop and there in my ice cream is half a tooth. I yelled out across the shop to the Mrs., “Hey I found a tooth in my ice cream!” to document when and where it happened. In my mind, I was already spending the money I’d make on the lawsuit when she yelled back, “Is it yours?”
