Q: You want the tooth?
A: You can’t handle the tooth.
or,
The Thrill and Anguish of Unplanned Dentistry
It’s amazing how quickly our bodies begin to break down.
One minute you’re fresh out of high school with the constitution of a racehorse in its prime, the next minute you’re preparing to let a doctor with a latex glove give you the old two-fingered “how’s-your-father” while you face the wall of his office, grit your teeth and try to think of something pleasant. As someone somewhere once put it, our bodies always betray us in the end, no matter how careful we may have been about taking care of ourselves.
Now that I’m circling my fortieth birthday, it has a actually become a little bit of a personal spectator sport to see which part of my body will volunteer to support the medical establishment next. This past week, it was good old “Number 18” – a heretofore-cooperative molar on my lower left jaw.
Number 18 and I had always enjoyed a good relationship. I could count on him to handle the grinding action needed for peanuts, celery sticks and the occasional piece of steak. For my side of the bargain, I provided an assortment of pricey toothpastes, name-brand mouth rinses, and at least two treatments per day with a nifty electric toothbrush. Sure, I could have been more regular with the flossing, but I didn’t totally ignore that part of it either.
I wanted Number 18 to be in my life forever. I thought the future stretched out before us to the horizon. I thought we had something special, that we could handle whatever foods life threw at us – together, as a team. We had some good times, Number 18 and I – that wonderful New York strip steak at the Lied Lodge in Nebraska City, the lamb curry at the Weston Hotel in London. But we wouldn’t have stopped there. We would have gone on to chew bigger and better things – exciting things – things that no one had ever thought to chew before. But it was not to be. Wednesday morning found me first at my dentist’s office and then, an hour later, at a nearby oral surgeon. Number 18 had split cleanly in half – don’t ask how or why. Perhaps he looked at my overall physical condition and decided to get out of it before the going got rough. All I know is that the post-mortem didn’t show any abnormalities in the tooth – no cavity, no infection. He just . . . well, cracked under the pressure.
Now, I’m not especially squeamish when it comes to medical procedures, but dental work usually scares the hell out of me. I’ve had a root canal or two in my time, sure – and I got through them with only a moderate amount of agonized writhing, whimpering and incontinence. But most of my most significant dental experiences took place during my graduate student years in my capacity as a crash test dummy for the university’s dental school. From a purely professional standpoint, it ranked up there with the kind of quality dental care one might associate with POW camps in the darker, less-tourist-friendly corners of Cambodia. If those treatments had been interrogations, I would have told them anything – anything – up to and including the secret recipe for my famous German potato salad. I’ve never, ever desired to re-live the experience.
Now, however, the stakes were higher. This was the first time that I’d actually been in an oral surgeon’s chair – and I was flirting with the idea of having a full-on panic attack
The first things I noticed were the wrist restraints on the chair arms. No, I’m not kidding. Black, nylon cuffs with seams of industrial strength Velcro bolted to the chair frame – more humane than leather straps or chains perhaps, but still more than enough to start me shaking. Frankly, I’d always thought if I ever ended up in a chair with wrist restraints, I’d either be praying fervently for the governor to call before they threw the switch, or (preferably) I’d be the paying guest of a masked, statuesque blonde wearing stiletto heels and a skin-tight black leather catsuit, playfully swishing a riding crop in time with the thunder of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor in the background
As neither of those contexts applied to my current situation, I could only surmise that the reality would be much, much worse. And so I sat in the chair, facing a blank wall and feeling the warm numbness creep across the left side of my head as the anesthetic took hold of a goodly chunk of my facial nervous system. Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” ran through my mind on continuous loop: Relax – just a little pinprick / there’ll be no more – AAAUUUUUUUUGGGHHHH! / but you may feel a little sick. At any moment, I expected the doctor to swoop in, strap me into the chair, and then – laughing maniacally while planting a foot on my chest for extra leverage – begin prying at my gums with a crowbar and pliers.
In the actual event, nothing of the sort happened. The surgeon and his assistant stepped in rather casually, as if they were just passing by on their way to another, more interesting procedure (which they were). They inquired about how the anesthetic was working, asked me to open my mouth so they could “take a look” – and before I knew it, good old Number 18 clanked unceremoniously into a small, kidney-shaped metal tray and was whisked away to whatever fate awaits molars once the Tooth Fairy no longer has jurisdiction over them. Within minutes, I was once more in my car with a bloody wad of gauze in my cheek and on my way back to a marketing meeting at the office where I would give the most convincing Vito Corleone impersonation of my life.
And so the watch begins again – which body part will give up on me next? With any luck, it’ll simply be my hair – but the smart money is betting on the brain.
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