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Part of the tooth

The troublemaker (click to enlarge)
The weekend trip to Hamilton, Kitchener, Cambridge and Waterloo didn't quite go as planned. For one, I never got as far as Waterloo. The reason for that is the "chewing gum incident". Let me elaborate.

As I was cruising through some residential estates in Kitchener, which is about 2h drive from Toronto, I delightfully chewed on one of those new brand gums. Now, in my experience there are no bones or stones or other hard things in chewing gum.
I brought the car to an abrupt stop when I noticed something in my mouth that had a lot of resemblance to a little rock. After a closer look I found that the unknown item must be part of a tooth. It only took a moment to realise which of my teeth was actually missing a fair chunk (a tooth in the back of my right, upper denture).

Hamilton downtown (click to enlarge)
There was no pain, which was good. Nevertheless, it took me a moment to snap out of a little shock.
Once back on track, I quickly researched local emergency services on my iPhone and started to ring them up. However, to my disappointment all of them were on voice mail stating that they would happily take my case (and money) first thing Monday morning. After about 15 to 20 of such pointless phone calls I decided to drive back to Toronto.
I tried a few more numbers back home of which one actually had a real-life person answering the phone. It turned out that I should be okay for another day if I didn't eat anything crispy or too hard.

So Monday I went to one of the dentists here, who generously scheduled an emergency appointment for Tuesday lunch. Hm, does that sound odd to anyone else?
Old city hall, Toronto (click to enlarge)
In all fairness, I had the appointment yesterday and the doc was very generous. He waved the emergency fee and didn't charge for X-ray, which approximately halved the bill. Also, he was a nice enough fellow for a dentist, so I scheduled a routine check-up. So the good thing that came of this incident may be that I found myself a dentist here in Toronto.

As for the reason behind the fractured/chipped tooth, he wasn't 100% sure. He suggested that I must have been biting on something hard, like kernels, which might have cracked the tooth. The chewing gum just pulled it out. Furthermore, the tooth already had a filling, which might have helped. So I was "lucky" that the crack didn't get to my nerves or the root of the tooth otherwise I would have spend the last couple of days in pain(!).

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