living like a weasel with tooth decay

And once, says Ernest Thompson Seton - once, a man shot an eagle out of the sky. He examined the eagle and found a dry skull of a weasel fixed by the jaws to his throat. The supposition is that the eagle hand pounced on the weasel and the weasel swiveled and bit as instinct taught him, tooth to neck, and nearly won. I would like to have seen that eagle from the air a few weeks or months before it was shot: was the whole weasel still attached to his feathered throat, a fur pendant? Or did the eagle eat what he could reach, gutting the living weasel with his talons before his breast, bending his beak, cleaning the beautiful airborne bones?
-Annie Dillard. Teaching a Stone to Talk. 1982.

the quote above is from Annie Dillard's story, "Living Like Weasels", plays a primary role in Laurie Anderson's Speechless (Eagle and the Weasel) from the album Bright Red. both address passion and impulse and holding on to life, no matter what happens. this is important to me, this week, because i just went to the dentist and found out that almost all of my teeth need dental work:

some teeth are not represented, because they're ok, or (as in one case) missing. the teeth that need anything with "resin" in them have surface cavities that require drilling and filling. the two that need to be extracted are rotted wisdom teeth. tooth #3 has a large filling that i had worked on when i was a kid - it is evidently "leaking" now, and requires a lot of work. in total it would take 4 visits (one for each quadrant of my mouth), and total $3658.00 - for someone with health insurance that does not cover dental. i now know what is wrong with my teeth, and thereby have a goal. before this i lived in denial and fear of what might actually be happening in my mouth. so i'm going to latch onto this, save/find some money or other dental options (UIC clinic?), and hold on. hopefully i won't be gutted - but if i were it would be a good case for how our health system in the US needs to be fixed. (really, i could only dream to live, or die, as a martyr for my liberal beliefs.)