It wasn't the filling

So... I went to the dentist on Monday morning. For a couple of months, one of my upper molars felt like it had broken and the filling was gone. It was also quite sensitive to cold. I told the dentist and he had a look. He decided to take an x-ray. He told me that it looked like the filling was intact, and the x-ray confirmed that. What seems to have happened, he said, was that I chipped the back of the tooth.

Since I don't have a copy of my x-ray, you get a shot of the garden shed with Jerusalem artichokes just starting to bloom.

He said that, somehow, the tooth had been ébréchée (chipped). There wasn't enough missing to fill it, so he decided to apply un vernis (a coat of varnish). I'm sure it wasn't actual "varnish," but the idea is to seal the exposed part of the tooth, protecting it and eliminating the sensitivity. He did about three layers, it seemed to me. It took about five minutes, then he went on to clean my teeth.