No fillings required, gold or otherwise

Needed to visit the dentist last Tuesday for a check/clean, which meant seeing my GP on the Monday to get a hit of antibiotics (to take an hour beforehand). When you've had a heart operation, there's a risk of serious infection. Surprisingly, not from the dentist's foreign cooties entering your bloodstream, but from bacteria that may be in your own mouth! Staph and strep can cause a nasty business known as endocarditis. The ol' ticker is normally well protected from this happening. After you've had an op, though, it's "shields down". Anyway, everything went fine.