Mandible & Foramen

Here are a few more malapropisms for you:

• Amazon review about a solar shower for camping: “When ever we left the water up to warm up, the squirrels would conjugate around it.”
• Collected by Small from a NextDoor post: A woman reported a car break-in and described what had been stolen. “Nothing but the floor mats! Granite there was nothing else worth taking.”
• Another NextDoor post: “My baby kitten joey … started getting really skiddish.” [Slick floors?]

I made another big Good Eggs grocery delivery order and accidentally bought triple the amount of summer squash than intended. Lulu suggested I freeze it and linked me to a how-to: wash, slice, blanch, flash freeze, bag. Done!

An additional purchase: a jigsaw to distract me from life.

My periodontist wants me to get a second opinion about this continuing mess with my face so I’m hoping Kaiser will let me see a specialist in their “oral maxillofacial surgery department.” For that to happen I needed a letter from aforementioned dentist, who wrote about my “…symptoms of possible neurovascular nerve injury/compression. A CBCT was taken and the #20 implant body appeared in the vicinity of the mental foramen and #18 in proximity to the mandibular canal… dysesthesia of the left face, lower left lip, left chin as well as a burning sensation of the lower left lip.”

I had no idea I even had a mental foramen. Shouldn’t it be “foraman” for just one of them? Wouldn’t mine be a “forawoman”? And why is there something “mental” in my jaw, anyway? I’m so confused.

The situation at the border in Texas, with angry white men on horses brutally corralling desperate Haitians, is shocking and devastating. Eleni linked me to video that I could barely watch. It made me remember some audio I still have on cassette that was gathered for one of Adi’s Bill of Rights Radio Education Project documentaries in the 1980s. It was a program I co-produced with her about bias in U.S. immigration policy. The following recording was made by someone (not I, but I don’t know who) of Haitian refugees singing at detention camp in Chrome, Florida circa 1984. It’s always haunted me. For the program, I had interviewed some Haitian “boat people” in a house in Oakland: over ten of them in one small room. Impoverished. Suffering. And the most gracious hosts I’d ever encountered. They offered me a meal of boney fish, which they could ill afford to do. I don’t have that tape, unfortunately.