Well ... Monday morning at 6am and i am down at the ER with my wife. This situation is a dead wringer for all those travel emergenices we keep talking about on this forum. The whole region in the Midwest is frozen with a polar air mass. Temperature here is minus one degrees, and thats without wind chill (which was bitter last night). By the way, if you ever get stuck like this ... Use a spare T-shirt as a scarf. The wind last night almost froze my face off. And in the middle of this ... My wife gets a severe dental pain condition. Its still amazing to me how badly the "system" handles some problems. Transportation on roads was nonexistent last night. Emergency dental - forget it. They are all asleep in their beds. The hospital can probably give better pain meds .... Maybe.

For those of you who are preppers. Only three things helped my wife last night - and not much. Motrin, ice, and soft food. Its a very good idea to have some mash potatoes in your emergency food kit ... Can be eaten even when mouth pain is very high. Motrin will cut severe pain just a little bit. Ice is helpful on infections and tooth problems.

We learned an inportant family lesson from this. Situations do come up where over the counter meds do not cut it ... For handling severe pain. We will solve that problem in the future some way. You might give that some thought yourself. :-)

Pete