A New Meaning to the Term "Won't Do Oral"

Valerie Lewis is having mouth problems: "Today, I want to shoot... but I cannot give a blow job because I had a tooth remove yesterday[.]"

In that slightly imperfect English that acts as a dead giveaway that she's a Quebecois, Valerie touches upon a problem we both have in common: searing oral pain in the backs of our mouths. Of course, I don't run a website that demands I use my mouth a lot, so I'd have to say she wins the "Who Suffers More" contest.

I bit the inside of my mouth a few days ago, far far in the back of my mouth where my rearmost molars meet. As a direct result of this, I have open tissue rubbing against sharp dental enamel at the precise spot where the inside of my cheek meets every moving part in my head. The pain has gotten better since yesterday, which tells me that it got infected or abscessed and I'm just now starting to heal. I haven't worked up the courage to actually look inside there yet for fear of seeing a sympathetic canker the size of a dime rotting away at my gumline or something else emaciatingly grotesque and Cronenbergian.

For the past couple of days, brushing my teeth has been an exercise in sinusoidal agony. Even though it's called a "Sonicare", it doesn't care in the slightest about what I'm feeling. So I wind up having its bristles vibrating my nerve ends at 12,000 RPMs and I can feel the stinging start as I work from the good side of my mouth to the bad one and back: "ow, ow, ow-ow, ow-ow, owowowOWOWOWOWowowow, ow-ow, ow...." I can rub the tender spot with a clean finger and it doesn't cause as much torment as the Sonicare does. Cool Mint Listerine is like some kind of puritanical fire that cleanses my palate and, for once, the burning feeling in my cheeks when I use it is a good sign.

When it heals, I think I might celebrate by starting my own rival website: The Art of Exaggerated Chewing.