Over the last few months I've had a very intermittent problem with my back molars.  Every once in a while - maybe once a month, maybe less frequently than that - I'll bite something and there'll be a pain at the back of my mouth, after which my tooth will be sensitive for a few days.  It's not a sharp, shocking pain...more of a pressure.  As I attempted to self-diagnose the problem, my guess was that the spot where my wisdom tooth used to be had left a little crater, and food was getting caught in there and causing trouble, because that's what it felt like - it was the same sort of mysterious ache that had plagued me when my wisdom tooth was healing.

Only problem with this theory was that there wasn't a hole at the back of my mouth where the wisdom tooth used to be.  It had healed up rather nicely.

So I finally went to the dentist today to have him figure it out.  He couldn't see anything wrong, and I hadn't had one of those pains since before I left for Florence.  He decided that the most likely explanation was that I had a slight tooth fracture, and every once in a while I was eating something in such a way that it would jar the fracture, causing the pain.  Then, since I would  change my eating habits to accomodate the pain, the tooth would heal up a little, nd all would be well until the next time I did something to it.  Since the pain is happening so infrequently, there wasn't much he could do about it.  He said to come back if the pain every got to the point where it was happening every two weeks or so, and they might put a crown on it.