I was sitting on my bargain-outlet green couch in our
apartment in Nashville, eating Cheetos and watching The Weather Channel. My
husband was in the second bedroom, which we used as an office, poring over textbooks
on ethics and constitutional law. As I swallowed my latest bite of Cheetos, I
felt a bump in the roof of my mouth. I thought it was a piece of food that had
somehow become suctioned to the roof of my mouth, so I tried to clear it away
with my tongue. When that didn’t work I stuck my orange cheese-dusted finger
into my mouth and picked at it with my fingernail, expecting it to spring free
and give me relief. It didn’t budge. Something was wrong.
Growing worried now, I jumped up from the couch and ran into
the bathroom. I tried to angle my head so that I could see the roof of my
mouth, but in the end it required a combination of hand mirror stuck partway in my mouth reflecting onto
the bathroom mirror in order for me to spy what the foreign object was stuck to
the roof of my mouth.
It was a tooth.
The idea of a mutant tooth coming in through some random
spot in the roof of my mouth threw me into a full-fledged panic. What was wrong
with me? What was that tooth doing? I wanted it out now.
I ran to my husband and showed him my mouth that had turned
into a freak show in the past few minutes, and he sat there bewildered. I’m
sure he suggested something along the lines of going to the emergency room. He
believes every physical event out of the norm, such as when he gets diarrhea,
is a symptom of imminent death. He has so frequently said to me the words “I
think I have a serious health condition” with all the somber gravity of someone
delivering devastating news that it has become a joke. Whenever he starts to
complain about anything, a headache or gas pains, I turn to him and say with
alarm, “I think you have a serious health condition.”
So it’s fair to say that, as I was already worried about
what on earth was going on in my mouth, I found no comfort in him. I called the
dentist office to see how soon I could get in. The first thing she asked was if
I was in pain, but I was not. She still managed to get me an appointment for
the next day.
I’ve always thought I had pretty good teeth. Not perfect,
but good enough that they didn’t need much work and I had been fortunate enough
to avoid the horror of braces during those awkward teen years. It’s true that I
knew that I still had two baby teeth in my mouth – my “fangs” – but I had them
for so long at this point (age 23!) that I figured I was going to keep them for
life. Previous dental x-rays in Wisconsin showed that my adult canine teeth
were up there but not in the right locations. Nothing was ever done about this.
Of course I blame my parents, who were in charge of my dental care as a child,
for not addressing the issue until the financial burden was on me. Well played,
mom and dad.
I also felt that somehow moving “down south,” especially into
the foothills of Tennessee where jokes about bad teeth were part of the local
lore, had jinxed me.
My dentist kindly reassured me the next day that it was not
a big deal, and she gave me the name and number of an oral surgeon who could
give me advice on what to do next.
The oral surgeon’s waiting room was beautiful, with a
stately, marble-column-and-velvet-fabric aura. He x-rayed my mouth and declared
that I should go see an orthodontist to get a recommendation and then the
orthodontist would send me back to him to get the work started. So off I went
again to the next expert, the orthodontist who told me that it should only take
about a year and a half of braces to pull the two teeth into place. Perfect, I
thought with complete naiveté.
I had about a year and a half left in Nashville and then we would be moving
back to Wisconsin. I could start the next phase of my life with my teeth in the
shape they were meant to be. I decided to go ahead with the procedures.
The process would begin back at the oral surgeon’s office,
where I was going to have my wisdom teeth pulled as long as I was there. My late-blooming
adult teeth hiding under the roof of my mouth would be hooked up to chains so
they would be ready to attach to braces and be dragged into place. It was about
this time that I realized both evolution and the science of oral medicine had
absolutely failed us. Is there anything more archaic than having metal wires
hooked up to your mouth so that your teeth can be painfully pulled in one direction or the
other as we suffer with the metal poking our mouths and putting
ourselves on restrictive diets? I won’t even get into the indignity of being an
adult with braces. It just seems that there must be a better way, and yet no
one has come up with anything.
My husband came to sit in on my oral surgery. I gave him
strict instructions to ask the doctor if it looked like my teeth would be able
to be moved into place before they went ahead and yanked my baby fangs. I
didn’t want to be toothless if moving the adult teeth was a long shot. He said
nothing.
He did, however, really enjoy watching the procedure and
then repeating the gruesome details to all our family and friends. “First they
slice the roof of her mouth along the inside front of her teeth, and then they
pull it back so that it was a flap hanging in her mouth. Then they could get to
the adult teeth underneath and glue on the metal bracket and chain that would
snake out from underneath the roof of her mouth after they put the flap back
and sewed it up. And her baby teeth popped out like nothing! The wisdom teeth
were a bit trickier. The doctor had to put his foot up on the armrest on the chair
for one wisdom tooth in order to get the leverage to yank it out!”
I was asleep for all of this, of course. I never would have
had to know the details of just how my mouth had been violated.
While I don’t remember anything during the surgery, the moments
before and after it were less than ideal. I don’t respond well to anesthesia.
The problem is not falling asleep. It puts me under just fine. In fact, I had
been talking with coworkers about it before the appointment. One of my friends
was saying she was terrified of the anesthesia because she thought she would
die while she was under. Another friend said that she started laughing when she
was put under for her wisdom teeth surgery because she knew she was about to
fall asleep and somehow found that funny. I admit relating more to friend
number one’s reaction than friend number two.
When they started the anesthesia my doctor asked if I was
nervous, and I bravely said no. Then he said, “A lot of people don’t like it
because they’re afraid they’re not going to wake up.” Nothing like just putting
your fear right out there. I’m sure my eyes grew wide as he spoke the words
that of course I was thinking. But then when he asked me to start counting
backward, I remembered my giggly friend and smiled as I drifted off to
dreamland.
Waking up was the hard part. I woke up and felt sick. I
didn’t want to stand up. But I got the feeling that I had been taking up the
chair longer than they expected. I felt bad and wanted to get in the car and go
home. I also must have looked a mess. They decided to take me out the long way
instead of through the waiting room. I would exit through a back door that
would bring me to the outer hallway and then I’d walk past the doctor’s office
door to the front door and never have to scare those waiting in the lobby for
their appointment. It didn’t work.
I groggily got to my feet and my husband supported me as we
walked out through a different door and entered the outer hallway. Before I
even passed the oral surgeon’s door I could feel that I was going to pass out
or throw up; one of those things was going to happen if the other didn’t. My
husband veered me right back into the main door and into the waiting room of
the office, where the receptionist jumped up to help steer me back into my room
as fast as possible. I could feel the cold sweat drenching my body as I lay
back onto the chair I had been in two minutes ago. My doctor and nurse
apologized but I closed my eyes and ignored all of them for another 10 minutes
until I was finally strong enough to make it to the car. It was a torturous
ride home. Even after we got back to the apartment and I was lying on the green
couch (because I couldn’t make it all the way down the hall to the bedroom), my
husband brought me a notepad and pen so I could talk with him and the first
thing I wrote was “You shake floor.” Even his footsteps were making me queasy.
And there is nothing you want less than to throw up when you have your mouth filled
with bloody gauze.
The promise of braces for only a year and a half didn’t work
out either. I came back to Wisconsin with my braces still intact and two teeth
that were still firmly under the roof of my mouth. Then I found a new
orthodontist and oral surgeon and dentist who had slightly different plans for
me. We kept trying to pull the teeth in but eventually realized only one of
them was going to make the journey. The other had to be pulled out and an
implant was drilled into my jaw instead. So I went through different ugly
duckling phases, from braces and missing teeth to braces and one missing tooth
to a retainer with a fake tooth to finally getting all the metal pulled out of
my head except for the part screwed into my skull that now held a perfect
replica of what my tooth should have been. In the meantime, five years had
passed and I had given birth to my first child.
Of course, if I knew then what I know now, I would have had
them yank all four teeth and put in implants for both of those teeth. I would
have been done in a few months as opposed to five years. Five years of pain,
unattractiveness, and hefty medical bills. The last surgery, to attach the fake
tooth to the metal implant after it had been given enough months to heal inside
my skull so that it wouldn’t be dislodged when I bit down, was on my 28th birthday.
I told the receptionist this as I was scheduling and she offered to change it
to a later date, but I couldn’t wait another day. It may have been an
unpleasant birthday, but it was still a gift to myself, because I was finally
done.
My million-dollar smile. Sorry about that college tuition, kids.
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