I never thought I would ever say the following words:
“I would rather have the root canal, please…”
Six months earlier…
My teeth have always been strong, though I used to get a lot of cavities when I was a child. Even with the massive doses of fluoride they used to swab on our teeth and shirt fronts in grammar school in the sixties, along with our vaccines, including the needle pricks on our left forearms one and the sugar cube one. That set us up for the latter part of the sixties where needle pricks and sugar cubes would take on a whoooole-neeeew-context. But that’s another essay.
Moving along.
Nobody knew what dental floss was and we only dragged the toothbrush back and forth across the fronts of our molars and front teeth, like they showed on the toothpaste commercials in Ozzy and Harriet breaks on our black and white Magnavox TV sets. Still, I could count on several fillings at each six-month visit. Four was not unusual.
Our dentist used drills that were powered by belts and pullies on a contraption that looked like a hideous mechanical insect from the industrial planet Giedi Prime in Dune. And he didn’t use Novocain for something as trivial as a cavity. That was just unthinkable. I remember the first time I did have a cavity as an adult, which was decades later, and they automatically injected me with Novocain.
I thought, “Huh? What?” and “Why?”
Who, when, and where were covered, though.
By the time I was a teenager I stopped getting as many cavities, and except for having my wisdom teeth pulled before going to college, with Novocain this time, I was mostly dentist-free. My face was so numb that lit cigarettes kept dropping in my lap as I drove home. I pretty much didn’t have any more dental issues after that for decades. Or cigarettes cascading into my lap.
Well, time and tide pull all teeth, as they say.
One peculiarity with my jaw is that I am missing my canines-they never came in. This limited my prospects as a vampire and made my appearance a little strange. The rest of my teeth spread out to take up the extra space like passengers on a subway trying to eke out the most personal territory on the A-train as they could, as one would do.
This had the effect that whenever I smiled my mouth looked like Stonehenge. Well, it was my upper teeth that were missing, so I looked like Stonehenge hanging upside down. Droop-henge? Tooth-henge? Either way it was hilarious. For those around me, that is.
My teeth were straight and healthy in other ways, and my mother asked the orthodontist if I needed braces when the time for such things came. Though she did it in a 1950’s Mom manner.
“If he doesn’t get braces will he lose his teeth by the time he’s forty years old?” she asked the doctor.
Moms back then had an obsession with their children turning forty and what perils that might entail for some reason.
I remember both my older brothers having braces for as much as five years, after which they looked pretty much as they had before getting them, and they made no attempt to hide the agony of them from me in every way possible. Brothers are like that.
To this day I believe the orthodontist tightened their braces each month with a torque wrench. So when the doctor said “No,” to my mother’s blunt question, I was relieved.
But I always hated the gaps in between my teeth. I’d hate biting into an apple and there would be furrows carved in the channel where I bit into it. I’d hate getting popcorn kernels embedded in my gums around my teeth. It seemed unnatural. Though I still get popcorn kernels stuck in between my teeth today. I guess that’s an everybody problem. Everybody who eats popcorn, that is.
So I got braces when I was 45 years old, Mom knew what she was talking about. The orthodontist pulled together my front teeth, trying to keep them as symmetrical as possible. Then when they were all shuffled together, I had one Sarsen stone sized gap on the left side of my mouth instead of several smaller gaps scattered amongst the Bluestones.
This I addressed by getting a titanium post dug into my jaw and a false tooth attached to it. I called it my alien implant, and I’ll put in a good word for you with the spacemen on the mother ship if you like.
Part of the reason for this much orthodontal-agony was vanity, of course. But I was also volunteering at a community theater, and I thought it might improve my stage presence. I doubt anybody noticed, but I felt better about myself, sporadically. Though when I see pictures of myself from that time today I can't help but think they could have played my face like a xylophone.
As I aged so did my teeth and jaws. Gums receded, nerves grew more sensitive, porcelain discolored and decayed, and calculus grew. I never could get calculus in college, but I got it in my mouth just great.
It started to hurt when I flossed. I started having pet toothaches that I could always count on like a loyal puppy. Places that hurt when I drank something hot or cold.
I had my first root canal about fifteen years or so ago. The tooth in question was dead, the nerves were at least, so it didn’t hurt very much. The shots of Novocain pinched but the drilling didn’t phase me at all.
I had always thought that root canals were very painful. This one took a while and was uncomfortable, but not that bad otherwise and I thought, “Hey, this ain’t so bad!”
My second root canal cured me of that misconception. This was an upper front tooth, and its nerve was alive and kicking, um… nerving. The nerve of it!
It gave me a run for my dental bill.
And now back to where I started. Six months ago…
My right lower jaw had been aching. It was more than uncomfortable. It was a pain too painful because it was pretty much in my whole jaw from the empty spot where a wisdom tooth had once lived to my front teeth. On the left side was one tooth that had a grudge against over and under temperatured liquids so now it was hard to negotiate my sustenance on either side of my mouth. Since absorbing nutrients directly into my skin like a jungle orchid was out of the question I had to find another option.
I mentioned it to my hygienist and my dentist. She took some X-rays and poked around, but not much more. “We’ll keep an eye on it,” they said. “Let us know if it gets any worse.”
I thought I had just let them know! But what do I know?
I started wearing a mouth guard on my teeth and gradually the whole jaw settled down and got only merely uncomfortable, but not really painful.
So I was surprised when my hygienist brought up that I had an abscess on my gum at the back of them. I think she called it an abscess, it looked like a mouth sore but it didn’t hurt.
She took some X-rays and the dentist came in and went over them with me. He pointed out faint lines on the X-ray. I looked. “Ah-huh,” I said faux comprehendingly.
“You might have some cracks along the root. We can’t really tell. I want to refer you to an orthodontist,” he said. “We might have to remove the tooth.”
“Oh,” I exclaimed. “An extraction?”
“Yes. And then you would get an implant.”
“Ye!” I exploded. “I got one of those here,” pointing to an upper tooth where the Sarsen sized hole had been and a false tooth on an alien implant now is. The thought of getting another one was not pleasant. Having that hole filled with a false tooth had taken at least two years and was not at all fun. It had been part of my whole mouth beautification process when I decided to get braces and reign in my wandering teeth, also not a pleasant experience. “We might be able to do a root canal on it.”
“Oh?” that sounded better.
“The orthodontist you’ll be consulting will tell us.”
And with that they gave me a name and address and instructed me to get an appointment for a consultation. “If she can do the root canal she’ll do it right then,” he said.
That was encouraging.
So I went home and called. They gave me an appointment for the next week. After the examination with Ashley, the hygienist, and some X-rays, etc., Dr. Medina came in to speak with me and explain the X-rays.
“You have an infection in your jaw,” she said.
“Oh,” more exclaiming. I was saying a lot of “Oh’s” lately. “Will I need an antibiotic?”
“Yes, I will prescribe one for you before you leave.”
“What do you recommend for the tooth?”
“We could do a root canal or extract it and put in an implant,” Pretty much what Dr. Patel, my dentist, had said to me already.
“Which do you recommend?”
“Well, it’s really up to you,”
“I have an implant already,” I said with some distaste. “And I’d rather not do that to another tooth.
“I would prefer the root canal, please.”
And there it was. Me requesting an orthodontist to drill out one of my teeth and fill it with mouth cement.
Well, what do you know?
