I had horrible chronic toothaches throughout the summer of 1996. I was forty and coping as best as I could. I still wonder if someone put a curse on me. There was one particularly weird and manipulative gay man (or ex-gay as he insisted on telling others given that he had become a fundamentalist Christian and wanted everyone to believe that he was miraculously healed) whom I bumped into in May on Denman Street. He was on his little electric scooter since he had, I believe, fibromyalgia or similar. I made the mistake of saying hi to him. He approached me and gave me a malevolent sweet little old grandmother who has just slipped poison into your sherry kind of smile and said in a darling little sneer, "Are you still hanging out with the gays?" I replied that I don't put labels on others and don't discriminate. I can't remember what he said to me but it wasn't particularly nice and it was that evening that my teeth began to make my life hell. Was I suffering because Daniel was right and I was being punished for sneering at God's minister? Or was he merely trying to work some kind of weird Christianized black magic on me because I disagreed with him.
More likely it was just a coincidence, he was innocent and did not need this kind of blame, and I really have to stay away from the book "Michelle Remembers"
I could not afford dental care. My job had a dental plan but it was only effective for employees working twenty hours or more a week. For some reason whenever my hours hit the magic twenty my coordinators would find some excuse or other for cancelling a client and reducing my hours to an ineffectual sixteen. I spoke to my boss about this several times. I was in extreme pain at the time. She was completely indifferent and basically blew me off.
In May, June, July and August I was tormented with pain, always for the last week of the month and only for a week. I have never in my life experienced such a brutal onslaught of pain. I found that the only way I could cope was by singing songs of praise and worship to the Lord when the pain was most intense. It wasn't easy, but it worked.
In August, just before the final bout of pain I had a vision of an angel. I had woken from a dream and there he was seated at the foot of my bed, robed in white. He was fair haired with a beautiful and noble face and large, luminous dark eyes. He smiled and said "You think I'm twenty-two?" because that is precisely what I was thinking. I replied, "No, you are older, much, much older than that, tens of thousands of years and older." The angel said "I want you to tell me what is troubling you. Tell, me please, tell me everything." And I told the angel everything, all the pain all the hurt, the injustice, the suffering. I eventually ran out of things to say. Then I clung to him asking him to please not leave, to please not ever leave me. I went back to sleep. I woke in the morning then fell into a light sleep. I had a vision of all the planets evenly aligned being held in orbit by the sun. Then I heard a voice, the voice of the angel say "You can never get far from me. I am with you always." I woke up weeping.
I am not making any of this up.
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