Don't have any tuna horror stories, but I have sliced the top of my mouth with a Kettle chip before. You know, when you intend to bite down to crunch it to pieces, but the chip gets stuck vertical. Ouch! I have a pretty high pain tolerance, but I HATE a bloody mouth.

OK, well this story is already partially written about in my column in the print version of indy.com, but to re-hash the premise:

I went to a movie a few weeks ago, and got a shard of popcorn caught behind one of my molars. I couldn't get it out, even when my mouth was throbbing at 3 a.m. a few nights later and I was attacking my gums with a toothpick. It got so bad and so swollen that I had to go to the dentist. By the time I'd made an appointment and gotten there, the pain has almost completely subsided. It was a non-issue. Then the dentist tells me I'll need 8 fillings, a root canal, two crowns, and all four wisdom teeth removed. How's that for horrific?

i once had a run in with a wine bottle that led me to thinking that i was in the foreign legion; i took a sword (read: long cutting knife) and tried to saber the top off of a bottle of champagne. needless to say i stopped drinking the bottle after spitting a little blood out with some glass. who knows what happened to my stomach? hey, it was years ago, so im sure any lacerations in my stomach or throat have healed by now, right?

I'm always up for a little scar viewing.

Holy crap! My cut finger suddenly doesn't seem so bad. Good luck with all that.

I haven't been to the dentist in ages...your story scares the hell out of me....

I hate, hate, hate going to the dentist -- even now, when I have a cool dentist and it's virtually painless.

Back when I was a little kid, we went to this pediatric dentist who inflicted misery on me like a Spanish Inquisitor. He hated me, and I hated him. "No, no Chris, you're exaggerating, dentists don't really hate their patients, especially children," you say. Bull-pucky.

I don't know whether it was the wimpy drugs they used back in the '70s or just that I have a freakishly low pain threshold, but whenever he would drill on me (which was a lot), it hurt like holy bejeezus. They would give me the shot; the shot hurt incredibly; then the drilling would hurt even more.

What made this so traumatic was that I would tell the dentist and assistant that it hurt, and they would tell me I was lying and it didn't really hurt. Then I would cry to my mother, and she would back up the doctor -- it doesn't hurt, be quiet. This is rough stuff when you're 7 or 8 years old. You're in pain, so your natural instinct is to tell grown-ups about it so they can make it better. And everyone told me to shut my yap.

So in revenge, I always bit the dentist's fingers -- hard. Thus, the hatred.

As I write, my fingers are burning after chopping many habanero peppers for a salsa recipe. I must not forget ... don't touch my eyes ... don't touch my eyes ...

I can sympathize. Dental care hasn't been any fun for me since the Tooth Fairy stopped visiting.