Praise Report: Dental Donation

Don't you love popcorn? Oh, I do. In fact, there I was the other night with a large bowl of hot, steamy popcorn liberally drizzled with real butter resting on my lap. With Mel Gibson's We Were Soldiers Once...And Young in the VCR and with salt shaker easily within arm's reach, I settled back into the couch for a quiet and restful evening of war, cholesterol, and hypertension.

Anyway, as the battle at LZ X-Ray grew to a crescendo, as the bullets flew between Gibson's air-mobile troops and the North Vietnamese regulars, I was shoveling popcorn into my mouth with a high rate of fire when BAM...I had something of an explosion in my own mouth...quickly my attention left the movie battlefield to focus on the discomfort located in my lower left jaw.

It seems an unpopped kernel of popcorn had found its way into my feed chute and jammed between my molars while my teeth were in full stroke and grind. Without going into a triage setting, I knew that bad things had just happened from the tooth bits and chunks of amalgam against my tongue.

The worst part was I still had 2/3rds of the bowl of popcorn left!

Over the next coupled of days I was able to see a dentist and he confirmed that my molar was cracked, catastrophic damage had occurred, and that a crown was necessary. Ka-Ching! "Do you have dental insurance?" No.

He thought for a minute and said, "Well then, I'll just donate the crown as a gift." I almost fell out of the chair.

Isn't that totally cool? Isn't that just a full-on blessing? Wow! I think so and I praise the Lord for the dentist's generosity and God's grace in all things. Please rejoice with me in this.

The prep work on the tooth has been completed and I'm scheduled to have the permanent crown in place the evening of April 1, just prior to my return to Ohio April 2.

A friend of mine told me that if I'd been eating a donut this wouldn't have happened. So true. But I believe there's a place for donuts and a place for popcorn in everyone's life. I'll just be a bit more discerning the next time I sit down with a bowl of popcorn.