I learned a valuable lesson tonight. As many lessons go, it was one I should have figured out before having to learn it by personal experience – but that is too often the way with me. Let me give you a little background.
I have mentioned before – and many of you know first-hand – that my mom had a few health problems over the last year. As those problems started to recede, Mom and I made a deal with each other: no more self-diagnosing. We would see doctors when needed and would each make sure to get regular check-ups and ensure our good health.
This has not been so easy for me, because I have an unnatural fear of doctors. Don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t run away should I pass one casually on the street. Medical dramas do not frighten me. I have spent much time visiting loved ones in hospitals without suffering ill effects from close proximity to those in the medical profession (save for wanting to throttle and/or maim one or two of them). So, perhaps I should rephrase the statement. I have an unnatural fear of doctors who are tasked with evaluating me.
They don’t even have to speak; I know what they are going to say: “Lose weight. Quit smoking. Your blood pressure is high. You have approximately 22 minutes and 32 seconds to live. Please pay my assistant in full before you croak. Have a nice [what's left of your] day.” I understand they likely wouldn’t be this obvious, but I can see it in their eyes – the shifty yet resigned look of disdain and disapproval in which doctors have become the world’s leading experts.
That said, you know who I fear even more than your standard doctor? The dentist. In my mind, the dentist is even more sadistic, judgmental, and scathing in their appraisal than even your most jaded and pessimistic doctor. With this in mind – and the misguided belief in conquering the worst of your fears first – I made an appointment with the dentist back in October. Keep in mind that before my first appointment, I had not seen a dentist in … 20 years? Let’s just say it’s been a shamefully long time.
Day one wasn’t so bad. A quick check-up for the dentist to tell me I needed a bunch of fillings and to schedule appointments through the end of 2008. No pain. My second appointment was for a cleaning. This one was not so much fun. First off, I got the hygienist I really didn’t want – the hottest girl in the building. While many might request such a girl, all I could think about was the cesspool of nastiness which surely must be residing in and between my teeth and gums and that this girl was not the one I wanted to have to work on it. Seriously, how do you go from “Oh my, you have a dirty mouth” (heh.) to “So, what are you doing Saturday night?” I personally don’t know how to bridge the gap between the two. I wanted some androgynous robot looking person to be the one cleaning my teeth for the first time in my adult life. I took faith in that once she put on all the gear (gown, glasses, hat, mask, etc), I wouldn’t have to see how pretty she was. Nope. I’m fairly certain she is the girl they get to model the surgical garb. The cap was tight-fitting and let these wispy locks of blonde hair curl out and fall over her obviously designer safety glasses which seemed somehow tinted to magnify the deep blue of her eyes. Her voice was soft and she talked the entire time she scrubbed, scraped, and made me bleed (I wondered a couple of times if I was really expected to answer, considering). I could see through her expensive glasses that she was quick to smile and her visible features seemed genuine as she did so. And the entire time, I am thinking, “This is complete and utter bullshit. Where’s my robot? I wanted a robot!”
I went for several more visits through the year, all of them with the actual dentist who falls into the ‘androgynous’ category once he dons the appropriate safety gear. These were mostly uneventful visits, except for the work on my bottom teeth. Those of you who have had fillings in your bottom teeth may be familiar with the numbing process. He puts the needle somewhere in the soft skin under your back molars, hits a nerve with the Novocain, sending a shockwave through your face on contact – then that entire bottom side of your face disappears, or so it seems. I also lose complete feeling and control of my tongue, which became a little bit of a hassle for the dentist and his not-quite-as-attractive-as-the-hygienist assistant. I had no idea what it was doing, but I guess it was all over the place. They pretty much had to hold my spazz-matic tongue in place to complete the fillings. And the quote from my dentist which I will never forget? “I know we’re great friends and all now, but how about you try to stop licking my hand?” That was just wrong.
So, aside from the obvious orthodontic work I need, there was one major thing I was looking forward to with this whole dentist business: having my lone exposed wisdom tooth taken out. It grew in a rather precarious position, facing full forward and butted up against the molar directly in front of it. The tooth was a little high, the upper half rising above the tooth in front. This raised portion of the tooth has kept me from completely shutting my mouth (top molars against bottom molars) without off-setting my jaw for about the last ten years. I was ready to be done with it. We tried to get it done before the end of the year for insurance reasons, but we just couldn’t get it in the schedule. The date was set for this past Friday.
Not really wanting to do it once the date was set – and spending two weeks alternately freaking out about it and looking forward to not having the tooth there anymore – the date trudged inevitably forward. I asked a bunch of questions to anyone I knew who had already experienced an “extraction” and was met with mixed reviews. For some people, it was a walk in the park; for others, it was a nightmare. Strangely, I was not too concerned with the pain associated with the days after the extraction. I was far more anxious that it would hurt while they were pulling the tooth – and at that point, what can you do? You can’t tell them to stop. That wouldn’t work. I was convinced it was going to hurt like a mother and I was going to have to sit through a four hour process while my hot hygienist and all of her equally hot friends sat in the room dividing their discussion between pole dancing techniques, their desire for men with no fear of pain, and the amusing faces and sounds I made while my sadistic dentist went to work on my mouth with a hammer and a chisel.
Thankfully, that is not how it went.
The day of the appointment, I show up and learned something I didn’t already know (among many others) – I have Junior for a dentist. He comes in, numbs me up with some kind of gel and then with an alarming number of shots with a huge tube of Novocain – and then he tells me that because of the positioning of the tooth and possible complications from the extraction, he was going to have his dad do the work. His Dad?? Seriously? And then he steps into the hall and says, “Dad, could you do this extraction for me?”
You know what? I have an enormous amount of faith in both my step-dad and my dad – in their abilities to do the things they know how to do, and their ability to learn new things – but I would never look to either of them and say, “You know, this cross-wind is a little crazy today. Could you land this airplane for me?”
That was my first thought – and it was a little freaky. I didn’t realize initially that while my dentist’s office posts the sign outside, “Dr. M and Associates”, that the Dr. M on the sign is actually Dr. M Senior and that my dentist is Dr. M Junior. Simple enough explanation, but still not something I wanted to hear when already so freaked out and anxious.
Dr. M Senior comes in the room, gives me another shot – just to be sure – and gives me a couple of minutes to get numb. I spent the time chatting [slurring/mumbling near-incoherently] with the dental assistant (I’m sure they have a title other than ‘assistant’, but I don’t know it). She commented that I looked nervous. I played it down as much as possible, not mentioning that my mind was already trying to find a good reason to bolt. She told me not to worry, that I actually wouldn’t feel anything – just pressure. This is what other people have told me, so I was starting to buy into the theory, finally. Any way you look at it, though – it was too late at this point. I fell back on one of my oft used quotes to myself – “This too shall pass.”
In all seriousness, I do say this a lot to myself when required to do something unpleasant. Even some of the most unpleasant things will fade from memory in time, I figure. The unfortunate part which also sticks with me is that this applies to the good things as well as the bad. Okay, serious note done.
The senior dentist comes back in the room, asks if I am numb, pokes me in the gums with some torturous looking pick device – and without preamble, starts to work. Here’s where I want to go back to that “pressure” statement I heard so often in the days leading up to this visit. “You will feel pressure, but no pain.” Yeah, that doesn’t really do it justice. What it actually felt like is that he was unhinging and ripping my bottom jaw from my face – but for whatever reason, it didn’t hurt. It was strange and alien and altogether unpleasant, I thought. I have no idea how he actually accomplished the extraction, but it felt like he was sticking that pick under my tooth and using it as leverage to wedge it out of my mouth, switching from side to side. I don’t think I am too far off base. It was, in the best word I can think of to describe it, a primitive process.
Here’s another point for dentists the world over: please remember when sticking drills, picks, pry-bars, or other plastic or metal objects in people’s mouths – please be careful the instrument you are using does not stick to the lip of your patient. Not cool. I felt like my lip was split in three places when I walked out of there.
Either way, it was over way quicker than I thought it would be. I was in the midst of that uncomfortable invasion of space with your dentist, where he is pretty close to your face and you are unsure whether to keep your eyes open, staring off to the side to avoid looking up his nose or into his eyes, or just closing your eyes and hoping he doesn’t commit some nefarious trick of dentistry while you aren’t looking – I choose to close my eyes – when he casually goes, “Hmm” … I open my eyes to see what is going on and notice he is looking at something. He then holds it up – it is my tooth – and way bigger than I expected! I was so relieved it was over, but then he delivered the bad news: there was still a sliver of it stuck in there. So the next 20 minutes were spent with him digging and digging until he found it. Then another 10 minutes of uncomfortable x-rays taken from the back of my throat forward to make sure he got it all. At this point, I didn’t even consider the hot hygienist might walk by and see me gagging and concerned I was about to choke on the x-ray equipment. I just wanted to be done. And finally, I was.
The weekend was spent in a Vicodin induced coma and thankfully, the pain wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.
When I finally got around to looking at the inside of my mouth, I was quite shocked by what I found. I’m not entirely sure what I expected, and it really does make sense to me why it should be there, but a gaping hole where my tooth used to be was not it. There is a hole in my mouth. More accurately, there is a hole in my mouth to which I cannot see the bottom. This bothers me a little bit. My mind fills in the gaps for me, illustrating tiny insects and critters that have moved in and now have a dark and moist, slightly coppery, new home. So I try not to think about it too much.
Which brings us to my opening line, which I never intended to be quite as far from this one in the structure of this post. I learned a valuable lesson last night.
For the past week, I haven’t been much on eating anything crunchy. The idea of crunchy food is quite unappealing, in fact. Instead, I have eaten a lot of soup. I am finally starting to get to that point where I want real food again, but figured I should start slow, with foods you don’t have to chew, like pasta and rice.
Lesson learned: do not eat rice with a giant hole in your mouth. Because, in all honesty, the hole is not that giant. In the grander scheme of things, it is a small hole – unless, of course, you were comparing it to an over-sized piece of rice. Then you would call it a perfect sized hole. I felt it happen and I immediately put down the bowl and feverishly thrashed at the offending grain of rice with my tongue. It was in there good and all I was doing was pushing it farther down. Shit.
Now my imagination lurches into overdrive, building speed and aimed right at the wall. What happens if it gets stuck in there? How will I get it out? All I could see was a rotting piece of rice, a new home to a host of maggots and spiders which would live furtively in the void which used to contain a tooth that never actually hurt me, but was a simple annoyance and I should have just left the damn thing alone. But no, I am impatient and don’t want to wait for anything and I just wanted to be able to shut my mouth again and keep my bottom teeth from going more crooked than they already are. And what did that get me? It got me a piece of rice stuck in a healing wound which was going to heal over, trapping the rice and maggots and spiders down there until one night in my sleep, when I least expected it, they would break the skin and crawl/slide down my throat and out of my mouth and all over me just like that chain e-mail said about not licking store-bought envelopes and you should buy the self-stick kind to keep this very thing from happening. And even if none of that happened, the wedged rice would not eventually come out, but start to rot, which would spread rot to my gums and by proxy, my jaw, until it progressed to my skin and I had to go to one of those radical doctors to have the whole lower half of my face removed so that I looked like that guy who got taken out by Rusty Nail in the movie Joyride.
It had to come out. Not later. Not soon. Now.
I looked in the mirror, could just barely see the top edge of the rice. What could I used to get in there? A toothpick! It seemed slightly ironic to me that you would still use a toothpick in the hole where a tooth used to be, rather than on an actual tooth or the space between teeth, but I let it go. I found a box of toothpicks and went back to mirror. Studying the wood splinter, I realize this is no normal toothpick. It’s a weapon! I don’t think I have ever seen such sharp toothpicks. This is the kind of thing that if you fell while you had it in your mouth, it would easily shoot through the roof of your mouth and lodge itself in your brain – and was thin enough that you may not have even realized it happened, but found out when you went to a doctor a week later for a persistent headache and a weird nervous tic in which you shout sexual obscenities at total strangers – culminating in your appearance on one of those shows like The 100 Strangest Things Found in the Human Head, alongside the guy who fell on his nail gun and didn’t realize it shot an 8 inch spike through his head.
So – very carefully – I put the toothpick in the toothless hole and dug around (with extreme caution) for a couple of minutes before extracting the mutant grain of rice. Whew! Catastrophe averted, lesson learned. No bugs here. I think I am going to swear off rice and stick with the larger pasta varieties for a couple more days.
Is this hole going to stay this way forever? Will it go away? Will at least become more shallow? I hope so. I can’t be thinking about maggots and spiders every time I eat a piece of rice for the rest of my life.
And, on that note, it’s late. Until next time.
Friday was the graduation ceremony. We had to be there two hours before the festivities began to be sure we had decent seats. Various people in our group had various opinions on the wisdom of this move. You see, when I graduated (and many of you, likely), we had the common sense to do so in an air conditioned building with normal seats. Vero Beach? Not so much. You get to sit in their football stadium. On concrete. In the sun. For four hours. While 570 people graduate.