You Can Chip My Teeth, But You Can't Chip My Spirit
Sometimes I leave my body and get into bar fights.
There are certain things you don’t want to hear your health providers say.
For example, you don’t want your family doctor to say thoughtfully, “Hm. That’s odd.”
You don’t want your optometrist to say incredulously, “And you’re not having any trouble seeing?”
You don’t want to hear your gynecologist say, “I’m sorry, the speculum is a little cold.”
Did you know that all of your teeth have a number?
That’s the code that teeth Nazis, a.k.a. “dental professionals”, use to talk about your teeth without you knowing what the hell they’re talking about.
So when my hygienist, Dawn, casually mentioned “that broken number 22” to my dentist, both of them standing over me like I was a dead turtle they’d found in the street, I wasn’t unduly alarmed. In fact, I didn’t think a thing about it until later, when I went home and took a closer look at Prisoner No. 22.
Tooth number 22 is the lower right pointy one (your “canine” or “eye tooth”, which, I understand the “canine”, but I’m not going to go down whatever rabbit hole “eye tooth” lives in).
Okay. Maybe 22 looks a little uneven. I wouldn’t call him “broken”. Maybe “chipped”?
And more importantly, HOW DID THAT EVEN HAPPEN?
See, I’m obsessed with my teeth. I’ve never had a cavity. And if anybody needs floss or toothpaste at the office, they say, “Go see Bev” like I’m the local pot dealer.
When I had a teensy, tiny bit of composite placed in a groove on one of my upper molars, my dentist yelled “IT’S JUST AIR! IT’S JUST AIR!” as I gripped the arms of the chair hard enough to leave permanent indentations.
The drilling took two seconds. Maybe he should TELL people when it’s just air that he’s using to dry out the surface of the tooth.
So it seems essentially impossible that I chipped a fairly large chip off my lower right canine without noticing. I guarantee if that were to happen today, I would LOSE MY MIND and possibly go to the ER, chip in hand, begging them to glue it back on.
Unless, of course, I swallowed it.
As I looked at poor, imperfect No. 22, I noticed that several more of my lower teeth were less than what you would call even. I have one particularly sharp corner on, I guess it’s 23, that I play with when I’m thinking. I could cut glass with that tooth.
And yet somehow, I never equated any of this with actual breakage. I just thought, “Teeth are like snowflakes. No two are alike.”
Well, apparently that’s wrong and they’re more alike than I thought. Something about “being human” and “evolution” and blah, blah, blah.
So HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?
I don’t remember any blows to the face or falling down a boulder-strewn mountain. I didn’t play softball. I wasn’t a junior featherweight.
It’s possible, but unlikely, that I once left my body while inebriated and ended up in a bar fight with 20 angry lesbians. (Did my best friend in grad school need to bond out of jail as a result? Yes. Yes, she did.)
Maybe that’s when it happened.
And no, chewing ice as a kid despite my mom telling me “You’re going to break a tooth” has nothing to do with it and I’ll entertain no further discussion.
Growing up in the dark ages with fluoride-free well water, I reached middle age with just one tooth free of "restoration". Such a positive-sounding word, for such a devastating process. On reaching middle age, a cherry that had held on to its pit caused the tooth just downstream to split right up the middle. The requisite bridge required removal of part of my sole perfect tooth for anchoring. Now I'm an old man with a mouth containing the history of dentistry. I take great delight when the hygienist attempts to floss the bridge, between what appears to be 3 separate teeth. My gurgling of "iss uh idg" has no effect.
So far the dentists I use nowadays seems much smoother than yesteryear. Better tools, drugs, and procedures. Which, as far as dentistry is concerned, makes me wish I'd been born 55 years later than I was. With one provision of course, get rid of the bean counters in the billing system, it seems there is a charge for every last procedure, can a cover charge for walking in the door be far behind, kind of like bringing in a older TV to a repair shop. Sure the after cleaning swag bag would still exist in the future, unless by then we are all GMO produced humans, but that's only to encourage buying more dental stuff and I suspect much of today's swag comes gratis from manufacturers/distos in the dental industry. Currently our dental outfit has display cases of various home dental paraphernalia in their waiting lobbies. Huh? All well meaning for our pie holes, of course.