Bite

My first clear dental memory is being four or five years old and studying my abscessed molar. It had been extracted and, since the Tooth Fairy was a major source of income at that time in my life, I had insisted that the tooth be put in a jar of water so I could put it on my nightstand and exact a big payoff. Surely the Tooth Fairy would fork over extra coinage for my pain and suffering and the opportunity to collect such a gloriously hideous specimen with pus and bloody roots still attached! I think I got a whole quarter. It set the stage for my future dental health to be both disturbingly bizarre and expensive.

In grade school I wrote an essay on how I thought the worst job in the world to have would be that of a dentist. I didn't like putting my fingers in my own mouth and the thought of having to spend the workday with my fingers in somebody else's mouth was totally repulsive. I had a lot of time in grade school to consider this because I had cavities, extractions, and numerous adjustments of my space maintainers which pulled me out of some of the best parts of my class day. In my college years I had to have my four impacted wisdom teeth chiseled loose from my jaw. The oral surgeon said his fingers hurt for days afterwards from all the pounding and hammering he had to do. My perspective on the event put it around #4 on my life scale of painful experiences. In my thirties I had three root canals and an insanely expensive bridge installed. The bridge was made out of some substance (we'll call it Wonderdentium) that I was told would outlive me. My life expectancy was brought into question when it broke two years later and I could make it go "sproy-yoy-yoy-yoy-yoing" with my tongue as if it were a diving board.

I should make it clear at this point that I don't hold any malice towards dentists, hygienists, oral surgeons, endodontists or periodontists. They have done their best with what I gave them to work with. They have had to deal with the oversized teeth in the undersized jaw, the super-tight jaw muscles preventing me from "opening wider," and the saliva glands that can nail a dental assistant within a six feet range ("careful, she spits.") Without the valiant efforts of dental professionals I'd have teeth that looked like a picket fence after a tornado hit it and probably suffer any number of health infirmities because of the inability to chew my food. In an earlier century I would not have lived past fifty and my teeth would have easily contributed to whatever else did me in.

Still, when in consultation with my endodontist and my dentist this week, I was informed that my body was reabsorbing the anchor tooth for my bridgework, I was seriously tempted to just bite somebody. My family consoled me by taking me out to a BBQ restaurant and letting me gnaw on a 1/2 rack of ribs. I have had two bridges anchored on this tooth and two (count'em TWO) root canals on it. It is so stressed that apparently my body is just eating it from the inside out. It will have to be extracted sometime this year. I'll lose the bridge. I'll have to have a bone graft on my jaw. Then they'll see if my jaw will accept implant screws. I'll have to have two screws crowned and possibly a crown on the back anchor tooth giving me more crowns than most royalty. As I think of the coming two years of oral surgery I'm having trouble not grinding my molars. Oh, well, maybe I'll lose weight on the liquid diet and end up able to bite through steel cable like Richard Kiel's Jaws character.