elanya

Just got back from the dentist, who gave me a hole in my head which I probably needed, since the alternatives was a hole filled with rotting tooth stuff, and then filled it with plastic. I think it was a much bigger cavity then he'd realized. When I booked the apointment back whenever (I don't even remember when now, it was so long ago), my tooth had been hurting a lot, so I suppose that even if it hasn't flared up in months I'm not *so* surprised.

Teeth and cavities are a thing which present me with what I think is a very interesting irony. Teeth in a living body are very vulnerable to decay, but often they are among the last bits to break down in a corpse. In some ways this is pretty obvious. I mean, dead people don't eat as much sugar, for one ^-^ Fillings also intrigue me in this way. Metal fillings, and I suspect even plastic ones, could potentially outlast any organic material laid in a grave* (and in the case of metal, they'll even survive cremation, I think), which means the last remnants of us left will be signifiers of our frailty. I suppose the same is true of things like artificial joints, bone pins, metal plates, etc, as well. Interesting

* I wasn't going to qualify that statement so much, but then I was struck by various considerations of taphonomy..