EMERGENCY!

 What a huge shocker. Early last week as I was eating the lately popular teppanyaki Napolitan I bit into something really hard. I thought there was a rock or something in my past and looked at the hard item only to find that it was a piece of my tooth.

 I'm very adamant about my dental hygiene clean and I'm proud that I don't have any gum disease, I clean my teeth with dental floss and pricey toothpaste and lately I've started to use that dental water flosser you see on TV to clean between my teeth. So in no way did I expect something like this to happen and it boggled my mind. I hurried to my dentist and found out that a tooth on the upper right side had a cavity and it was that tooth that broke off.  

 The dentist said "You were lucky. If it broke 1 mm more, you would have severed a nerve and it would have been excruciatingly painful." 

 But I don't feel lucky at all. If this happened when we were on the Pacific, that would have been terrible. The dentist covered the tooth as an emergency measure but what if it comes off while we our at sea and the nerve gets exposed? I won't be in any condition to sail. Luckily, I was able to get a last minute appointment and I got the nerve removed. What a relief. So many unexpected things happen.

 I lost a lot of valuable time to load my things to the dental procedure but now we are down to 2 days and we have been able to load most of the necessities. Now all we do is wait for the wind.

 I am so excited...and a little nervous. After the tooth incident, who knows what will happen?  

Originally posted by Jiro Shinbo in Japanese on 6/05/2013
Translated by SWIS Project