Actually, no.
Make that a tsunami of anger.
Recently, my partner J told me something that made my jaw drop.
J had lost a tooth because our regular - but apparently incompetent dentist - had failed to prevent a crack in his tooth from worsening.
It all began last year when J complained of a toothache.
I had accompanied J to visit Dr C, whom we'd been going to for the last 10 years.
We would go for the usual - cleaning and maintaining our teeth.
During our visit then, Dr C said he couldn't find anything wrong with J's tooth.
No crack, no decay, nothing.
So of course we trusted him.
Weeks later, J felt a very sharp pain while having dinner.
He immediately made an appointment with Dr C the next day.
Turns out, the very tooth which Dr C had dismissed as having "nothing wrong" had cracked right down to its root.
It had to be extracted because there was no way the tooth could be salvaged.
I posted this shocking piece of news in our group chat with the boys - Stanley the sex bunny and Carl the dense one.
Stanley was indignant.
"WHAT?!" he wrote.
Carl the dense one, who has no idea how many teeth an adult has, replied with a series of exclamation marks.
"Will J sue?" Stanley asked.
"Oh my god, I am so angry right now," Stanley wrote all in caps.
But of course, J won't sue.
My kind-hearted J - God bless his heart (and all his remaining teeth) - had decided to not pursue the matter although he could have kicked up a fuss.
"It's just a tooth," J told me over video call the other day.
Stanley told me later that if it were up to him, he would return to that clinic and bite that bloody dentist in his ass, missing one tooth or not.
And then came Stanley's next most pressing question - was J disfigured?
Tooth be told, J wasn't, since the extracted tooth is hidden deep in his mouth and isn't visible.
Still, Stanley wasn't pleased.
And neither was I.
I was in anger.
But more importantly, my heart ached.
It pained me to know that J had lost a tooth - a perfectly fine tooth if only Dr C had exercised due diligence and called for a scan which his human eye couldn't detect.
It pained me to see J in such a health crisis I never want him to be in any sort of medical emergency.
Over the next few days, I had been googling facts about missing teeth and whether it was necessary to replace them.
All the literature I read suggested that it should be, or a slew of problems including overgrowth or invasion of teeth into that missing spot would occur.
But all J would do was to assure me that his eating and chewing weren't affected, and "it's just a tooth, dear. We'll see how."
Stanley didn't think so.
"How would your blow jobs be from now on?" my concerned sex bunny friend asked.
The supportive Stanley later told me he messaged J to offer his condolences, to which, J replied that everything is okay and that I had been the one to blow things out of proportion.
Stanley told me he wanted to reply J that "blowing" is indeed one thing he needs to think about carefully in the future, but decided to be a toothless tiger instead.
J's tooth loss got me so upset that for the next few days, all I could think of was that my lovely partner J now has one less tooth.
Of course, to put things into context, it's "just a tooth" as J had comforted me.
It could have been worse - the loss of an eye, or a limb or something.
Which got me thinking.
If J were to need a kidney transplant I would willingly give up mine.
Or if I could have my way, I would even give up years of my life so that J could live longer.
J replied me with a smiley icon when I shared those thoughts with him, and stressed for the umpteenth time that "it's just a tooth lah".
Stanley on the other hand was more appreciative.
"I love it that you're so melodramatic," he said with approval.
"And by the way," Stanley said, "as a gift to my best friend, I have hooked up my ex with your current bf."
For context, Stanley had once dated an orthodontist who brought the screwing, drilling and prodding from the dentist's chair to the dentist's bed.
Said bed was in Orchard Road, where Stanley had on more than one occasion, graced with his bodily warmth.
Anyway, the point is, Stanley and the dentist didn't work out and their whirlwind relationship ended like the fate of a decaying tooth.
The bigger point is, Stanley had actually got in touch with the dentist for J's sake, asking him if he would "do the procedure for my best friend's partner".
At that moment, I had to busk in my simple joys.
That I have a non-fussy, easy-going partner, and a gay best friend who would go all out for me and J.
"Yeah, count your blessings," Stanley wrote to me that night.
"And if you're J, the answer would be 31".
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Adam's stories are based on real life events and inspired by real people
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