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I got my teeth cleaned today. My dental hygienist is superb at what she does, but rides her patients pretty hard. Scraping away at the plaque, she admonished me about a few spots that needed more attention. In that moment I must have groaned, and thinking I got hurt, the hygienist asked with alarm, “are you ok?” In fact, I was refecting the pain of being a teeth-cleaning failure.
Illustration by Ella Frances Sanders [1]