the dentist

So the plan, as I stated before, was that the wisdom tooth pain would just go away. That’s what usually happens with me and tooth pain. I’ll feel a bit of tenderness for a few days, and think, “oh, well it’s probably just my sinuses,” or “if it doesn’t go away in a week, I might think about getting it checked out,” or, “maybe I should try a different mouthwash,” and then it will disappear, and I’ll forget about it.

That’s how it always goes, and that’s how it went back in November, when I first noticed that I had some nasty-feeling tooth bits sticking out of my gums back where I was pretty sure a wisdom tooth would be. It hurt, and I thought, “huh, this could be a thing,” and then it stopped hurting so much, and I forgot about it. Except when I happened to touch those tooth bits with my tongue. Then I would shudder, just a bit.

In the comments on my last post, Animal asked what on earth I was doing with wisdom teeth still in my mouth. I know many people get these suckers whipped out before they’ve even hit twenty. But here’s the thing: I don’t go to the dentist. Ever. When I was eighteen, I moved out for college, and realized that my mom couldn’t make me go to the dentist anymore. (My dad never had much moral authority on the issue, because he doesn’t go to the dentist himself.) Wheeee! I remember my mom saying to me once, my freshman year or so, “Have you seen a dentist since you started college?” And I said, “No, I have not,” and she said, “You better make yourself an appointment,” (all of my mom’s best sentences begin with the phrase “You better”) and I said “YOU CAN’T MAKE ME,” and she said, “No, I suppose I can’t,” and so I didn’t.

Once, when I was twenty-four or so, I started having pretty bad pain in a few of my upper molars, and it hung around for a while. I was a grad student at the time, so I had enough piddly insurance to go to the student health center, where they whipped up a quick X-ray and told me the roots of my teeth grow into my sinuses. It sounded ghastly, but they said it was normal. So for the next eight years I blamed any and all tooth pain on my sinuses. And did not go to the dentist.

Now might be a good time to point out that I actually have really stellar teeth. Really top-notch, first-class specimens. I have good genes and even better oral hygiene. My habits were cultivated back when I was practicing the flute for hours a day and lived in dread of blowing festering chunks into my instrument. I had a flute teacher in high school whom I now recognize was a bit compulsive on this whole oral hygiene=flute hygiene issue, and thanks to her example, I brushed my teeth pretty much constantly. I brushed after meals. I brushed after eating an apple for snack. I brushed after one bite of someone else’s potato chips. I have eased up a little bit in the intervening years, but I’m still very much a brush three-times-a-day/floss at least once a day kind of girl.

So until last week, when I started feeling as though someone was inserting a paring knife in my gums every time I moved my jaw, I was pretty okay with my policy of ignoring the American Dental Association’s recommendations. (Every six months? Come on, people!) I’d always measured my dental visit record by what I’ve come to think of as the David Sedaris Model. In one of his pieces, he says (and I quote from memory), “In my mind I’d just been to the dentist. But in fact, a child born on the day of my last dental appointment would be thirteen years old, with bleeding gums of his own.” I’d gone that one time when I was twenty-four, so by the Sedaris Model, I had until age thirty-seven before I was due for the next appointment. That’s five more years! Never mind that when David Sedaris did finally go to the dentist, they cut open his gums and removed “what smelled like human feces” from his mouth. In my mind, that information is not relevant to the Model.

On Tuesday morning, when I realized that I needed ibuprofen just to face breakfast, I dispensed with the Model and made a dentist appointment for the next day.

As I drove there, I thought of excuses I could give for why I’d missed so many years of appointments. I have some good ones. For one thing, I have to take antibiotics before any dental procedure, even a teeth cleaning, because of a (thankfully asymptomatic) congenital heart condition. I’m not clear on why this is; it has something to do with an increased risk of bacterial endocarditis, which apparently can be set off by the seemingly benign actions of your friendly dental hygienist. But I hate taking antibiotics. I hate it enough to skip dentist appointments. Also, the insurance thing. It’s true that for several years in my twenties I did lack dental insurance, but I haven’t had that excuse now for over three years.

As it turned out, excuses weren’t needed. “You’re here now, and that’s what matters,” said the dental hygienist. She started off with X-rays, revealing, unsurprisingly, that my jaw is too small for my top wisdom teeth. Then she got out the scraper.

In order to distract the patient from the goings-on in his or her mouth, this dental office had helpfully placed a large television, tuned to The Weather Channel, in front of the patient’s chair. It was on mute, but The Weather Channel, which, as as I’ve written before, is essentially a porn channel for storm fetishists, has closed captioning. And what a relief that was, because what with the global financial collapse, increase in civil unrest, nuclear missile tests by governments run by insane people, and ominous global warming news, I had completely forgotten to start pre-emptive fretting about tornado season.

Well, The Weather Channel had the cure for THAT oversight. It was the 2009 Tornado Spectacular Preview Morning, complete with repeated images of mile-wide twisters tearing apart Midwestern towns and glassy-eyed, traumatized children being carried away from scenes of wreakage. I started a mental checklist of emergency supplies. Do we have extra gallons of water? Flashlights? A weather radio? What I love about The Weather Channel, in a twisted way, is that they are so overt about the fact that they are trading in the anxiety business (unlike CNN, say, where they act as though they have a higher purpose—as if). They literally state outright, “It’s almost time to start worrying about tornadoes!” Thanks, friends!

Every ten minutes or so, the dental hygienist checked up on me. “You still doing okay?” she’d ask. I’d say, “Yeah, I’m fine.” After what felt like at least an hour of this—scrape, scrape, tornado porn, scrape—I started wondering if we were in a time warp. The cleaning session had begun with extravagant praise of the condition of my teeth: “You have really great teeth! You must be a really good brusher and flosser! I don’t see any surface cavities!” Then she started the scraping, adding that, “even the best brushers have some tartar buildup after eight years.”

And then I started thinking…that last dentist appointment, when I was twenty-four, and had the X-ray? I don’t think they bothered to clean my teeth at that one. Which means, assuming my last bona fide tooth cleaning was back when my mother could still force me to go to the dentist, that she was scraping about fourteen years worth of tartar buildup off my teeth. Even by the Sedaris Model, this is kind of gnarly.

I didn’t know if disclosing the information would make me look better or worse, so I said nothing, which was the path of least resistance anyway, what with all the dental instruments in my mouth. I wondered, idly, if dental hygienists are capable of eating tartar sauce with their deep-fried fish. Would they be so over it, or would the mere suggestion of the word “tartar” applied to a chunky white sauce be enough to set off a series of unpleasant, work-related images? I felt a little gaggy then, but I fought it. My hygienist was doing heroic work. I didn’t want to complicate her job by throwing up in my mouth.

Finally she finished. The dentist popped in his head for about thirty seconds, long enough to look at my X-rays, concur that my top wisdom teeth need to come out, and give me a referral for an oral surgeon. He reiterated that I have “great teeth.” (He missed out on the tartar.) The he added that I should come back to him for another appointment, as he wants to replace an old filling, which is made of aluminum foil or pencil lead or whatever the hell they made fillings with back in the eighties.

The sad thing is that I have to do all this around the same time I am taking care of my cat’s skanky mouth. His dental surgery is scheduled for this coming Monday, and like me, he has to take antibiotics beforehand. On Tuesday I went out and picked up antibiotics for both of us. Mine, with insurance, cost sixty-eight cents. His were $19.95.

At least he gets general anesthesia. I have a feeling my insurance company is going to make me suck it up and go local. I have a couple weeks left to eat ibuprofen and build up my nerve.