A Toothsome Tale

or...

A Story With a Moral

About ten days ago, after Loralee finished eating her delicious dinner, her teeth started hurting her. It felt like the gums in the lower-right part of her mouth were getting sick.

Loralee thought, "Oh dear. I have not been very good at flossing my teeth lately; maybe my gums are getting sick." So she went right into the bathroom and carefully flossed her teeth; they bled a little bit, so she was sure that her diagnosis was correct. Then she brushed her teeth for three whole minutes! "That should make things better. "she thought.

Her mouth still bothered her the next morning, but she knew that if she was diligent in brushing and flossing, then she would feel better in a day or two. By that night her mouth hurt even more, but she still had faith in the words of every toothpaste commercial—and every dentist—ever.

The next day Loralee's mouth hurt her even more. If she touched her gums—particularly on the inside, and especially on the spot between her two back teeth—then the pain was terrible! Throughout that day she could feel her pulse beating in those back teeth. It smarted when she chewed food on that side of her mouth. By bedtime the throbbing in her mouth had given her a frightful headache. Loralee was sad. She was also a little puzzled. Those back teeth were not sensitive to heat, cold, or sugar—only pressure. This didn't sound like a root canal, or even a cavity. What was going on here?!

For the rest of the week Loralee brushed and flossed her teeth after every. single. time. she ate anything, but the pain grew and grew. By Saturday she was having headaches and a sore throat all day long. "This is worse than I thought," she reflected. "I will need to call the dentist and probably have a root canal." On Sunday her mouth hurt, her throat hurt, and she had a monstrous headache that got worse and worse throughout the day. When she went to bed Sunday night she was beginning to have an earache too. She was worried about getting a root canal, or maybe even needing to have a tooth (or two!) extracted, and how to pay for that. She took some Tylenol and sorrowfully went to bed.

Very early on Monday morning Loralee woke up just enough to roll over in her bed. In her groggy state she felt something small fall from the back of her mouth to the front of her tongue. She wondered if a piece of a chipped tooth or broken filling had fallen from those sore teeth. That woke her up! So she snatched the bit out of her mouth and went into the bathroom where she could turn on a light and look at it, and look in a mirror without waking anyone else up. She studied the thing she'd taken out of her mouth; it looked like a piece of a popcorn kernel. This was strange...It must have been more than a month since she had eaten any popcorn!

Loralee went back to bed, hoping that the bit of popcorn was the sole cause of all her troubles. When she woke up a few hours later she poked at her gums, on the inside, between her two back teeth—just to see how they would feel about that. They were a little sore, but not very bad at all. By dinner time that night she was able to eat normally, her teeth did not hurt any more, and she had no headache. She went to bed happy that night.

And the next day—except for her extra careful and frequent brushing and flossing—it was as if she had never had a tooth problem in her whole life.

The moral of this story is:
You should be very diligent about flossing your teeth, or you might regret it a month later.

Or maybe the moral is:
Popcorn is sneaky and treacherous—Do not eat it!