Most of the time, my tongue and my teeth are blissfully unaware of each other. They each just do their thing, and everyone gets along just fine. But then one day I lost the bonding on the back of my bottom front tooth and suddenly my tongue was all over it. My tongue was like "tooth tooth tooth tooth tooth" all the time until it was raw and sore. I was sure my tooth was antagonizing it, so finally I yelled, "Cut it out, you guys. Don't MAKE me come back there!"

Naturally this happened at the end of the day Friday and because it wasn't technically an emergency, I had to wait three days to get it fixed. In the meantime, my husband was blissfully unaware of my situation, or didn't actually care, and ordered a pizza to eat while he watched "the game." I grabbed a slice, which was piping hot, and then thought better of it because I was sure if I burned the roof of my mouth, I would have a complete breakdown.

I knew that I had to do something about the situation until I could get to the dentist, so my tooth, my tongue and I all left the house and went to the drugstore.

I looked around the mouth aisle and didn't see anything specifically made for when your tooth and your tongue are fighting. But then I remembered something. The thing that made my children's lives manageable through their orthodontic years.

Wax.

When their braces were scraping their cheeks, they would put a little piece of wax on the braces to create a shield. THIS was going to save me from the tonguepocalypse.

At first, I couldn't find the stuff, and I thought I was going to have to go to an orthodontist office disguised as a middle-schooler and get some there. I thought if I wore a pair of Uggs with leggings and a puffer jacket while my face was buried in my cellphone, it just might work.

Fortunately, I spotted the wax very low on the display, in a tiny little plastic container, lined up in strips.

I grabbed one, paid for it and broke it open, and applied a little bit to my broken tooth.

The sun shone down. The angels sang. I had relief.

And then I swallowed it.

I broke off some more and applied that one. And then I swallowed it.

Apparently, the stuff was very good at sticking to your teeth. It just wasn't very good at staying there.

I went home and repeated this process about 14 times throughout the day. No matter what I did, I couldn't get the wax to stay on. At this point I thought I'd probably swallowed enough wax to grow a candle in my stomach.

"How's the wax thing going?" asked my husband when he got home from his outing.

"It's not," I said glumly.

"Why?"

"The wax won't stay put," I said. "I've swallowed enough wax to grow a candle in my stomach."

"I'm really sorry, honey," he said sympathetically. "How about we get some ice cream to take your mind off it?"

"No, thanks," I said. "I'm full."

Tracy Beckerman is the author of the Amazon Bestseller, "Barking at the Moon: A Story of Life, Love, and Kibble," available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble online! You can visit her at www.tracybeckerman.com

Photo credit: Diana Polekhina at Unsplash