I remember a moment several months ago, sitting outside the care home with Mom in the dark. Even masked-up and six feet apart, we did a pretty good job of communicating. Mom asked me how things were going. I said, "Situation normal," and rolled my eyes. She didn't know what that meant. I explained. I'm sure she used to know, because she was married to a former Marine for over fifty years. However, dementia has a way of dispersing brain cells, and most likely some of the ones that evaporated from her head were the few that would have provided a definition of SNAFU.
It's hard to plan for some things, though. Toothaches. Car problems. We all know teeth and cars go gunnysack sometimes, and we all know they don't heal themselves, although in the specific case of strange noises in cars, it helps to have a working radio.
Twenty-four years ago, shortly after I moved back to Portland from Los Angeles, one of my lower molars began to ache. I'd had a crown put on the tooth before I moved and figured the job was done. But teeth choose their moments to wake up and sing. I got a referral from a friend to a dentist, who admired the crown and then proceeded to break it when he drilled through it to give me a root canal. So, a root canal and two crowns later, you'd think the job would be done. Over the years, however, that tooth never gave up. The first dentist retired and died and a new dentist took over the practice. Every six months as I lay captive in the comfy chair, the new dentist would say, "Any teeth giving you trouble?" I would reply, "Well, just that one that refuses to die." Ha, ha, the dentist would laugh (her teeth were perfect). "The x-rays don't show anything," she would say, shaking her head.
The zombie tooth came to sluggish life a couple weeks ago, providentially coinciding with my six-month cleaning. I reclined in the chair, feeling awkward and wrong at being so close to other humans without a mask on my face. When the dentist arrived, I said, "This tooth! It's alive, I tell you, alive!"
She poked and prodded, gave me some things to bite on. The tooth didn't hurt much but I had this persistent belief that it shouldn't hurt at all, seeing as how it was supposed to be dead.
"Well, root canals don't last forever, you know," she said. What? That is the first time I'd ever heard that. A dead tooth should remain dead, they should not be able to come back to life. This is not the dental equivalent of The Walking Dead. "I'll give you a referral to an endodontist," she said. Apparently she doesn't do root canals.
As soon as I got my stimmy, I made the appointment with the endodontist. Her office was in a half-vacant building in SE Portland, not far from an area rife with shootings, conveniently located near the freeway for quick getaways. I was the only patient in the place, probably by design. The office looked like a 1990s hotel, all gray tile, gray carpet, and recessed strip lighting, very moody and mod.
The endodontist was a tiny woman, much younger than me. She peered at a monitor nearby showing the CT scan of my jaw. I took a quick glance from the chair. I'd never seen teeth in such fine resolution. Those dental x-rays you see on your dentist's screen? Amateur hour. It's like the difference between microfiche and Blu-Ray Hi-Def plasma TV.
"Wow, is that my tooth?"
"Lay back. Let's see this thing." She put a light on her head and a microscope over my mouth and came at me with something shiny and sharp. "You have a rather small mouth."
"Yow!" I yelped around her fingers.
"Nine millimeters," she said, oblivious to the tear edging out of my left eye. She jammed the probe in again. "Yep, nine millimeters. It looks like when they did the original root canal, they missed a little spot here in the back. And now the tooth has grown away from the jaw, leaving this large pocket, which has been infected, probably for a while."
I hoisted myself out of the chair and followed her into the room with the CT scanning machine. The room was set up like a movie theater, with several rows of folding chairs facing toward a large computer monitor, on which I recognized my CT scan. I imagined the endodontist and her staff unwinding after a long day by watching movies of suffering patients enduring remedial root canals.
She took a blank CD from a stack and inserted it into the computer. As the file transferred, we sat shoulder-to-shoulder on folding chairs in front of the screen. "See that dark gap there? That is where the tooth has detached. It's empty space, nothing there."
I gazed resentfully at my delinquent tooth.
"We could try to save it, but it probably wouldn't work." I turned and looked at her eyes because that is all you can see when a person has a mask on. She turned and looked at my eyes for the same reason. So there we were staring deeply into each other's eyes. I'm thinking a succession of thoughts: she has nice eyes, what the hell, Dr. Jim!, and why am I not more upset, I'm going to lose a tooth.
"I'll send my report to your dentist," she said. "Here's a copy for you to take to Arizona."
The receptionist graciously gave me copies of the many forms I had filled out and signed in the waiting room promising not to sue if the remedial root canal went sideways. (Ha, ha, all moot, but I still wanted those copies.) She took my check for $330, and I took my throbbing jaw home, dismayed at the pain. No more half-dead zombie tooth. It's simmered down a little but I'm not back to baseline. Almost a week later, I'm still cutting my food into tiny pieces, cooking it to smithereens, and swallowing it whole. Even sneezing is dangerous—do you mash your teeth together when you sneeze? Right. I didn't think I did, either.
This tooth wakes up and salutes every four hours. Tylenol and Advil are tiding me over until my dental consult on Tuesday. I think I know what will happen then. My lovely dentist (who specializes in cosmetic surgery, not root canals) will cluck her perfect teeth and express her sorrow that I'm leaving town before I can buy an implant. If all goes well, I expect I'll be taking antibiotics soon and by the end of April I will be driving out of town with a new hole in my head. I'm not afraid. I've had braces.
On the bright side, today I took my Focus through the drive-through car wash for its annual scrub. I always clench up at first, afraid to take my foot off the brake and surrender to the giant maw. Once I relaxed and let go, the giant felt fingers and rivers of white suds worked their magic. I felt calmer and my car came out minus one layer of dirt and moss. Next task is to vacuum the interior. I want the old thing to look its best when I trade it in for my getaway car.
