Stoics don't cry

Last week I left you with a cliffhanger—would I survive the dental debacle or would I run screaming like a crybaby into oncoming traffic? Were you worried? I wasn't. But I should have been. I arrived to the emergency dental appointment on Tuesday, sure I was going to get a round of antibiotics and be feeling better in no time. That is not what happened.

The dentist took off the temporary crown and peered into the abyss. "I'm going to put some cold stuff on that back tooth and you tell me if it hurts," he said. 

He sprayed something on a q-tip and poked the tooth.

"Yow!" I said, just about levitating out of the chair.

"It's not infected," he said. "And you don't need a root canal. If the nerves were dead, you wouldn't feel a thing. Let's try putting some desensitizing liquid on it and put the temporary back on. See what happens. Sound good? Okay. Maybe we can numb it up a little bit," he said. 

What do you mean, a little bit? I didn't find the uncertainty in his voice reassuring. I laid there with some misgivings as he prepared the giant silver needle ray gun. He came at me from below, thinking he could fool me, but this was not my first rodeo in a dental chair. However, I welcomed the pinch and pull and stabbing pain with my trademark stoicism because I was pretty sure sweet oblivion would soon be happening.

"I'm going to go check on my other patient," the dentist said, stripping off his gloves. I sat in the chair and stared out the window at the cloudy sky, hoping to soon be able to rest my tense shoulders and relax my furrowed brow. I patted my face a few times. Was it getting numb? Not fast enough for me. 

All too soon, the dentist returned.

"It's not numb," I said.

"I think the desensitizing agent will help," he said. "But it is going to be very cold at first. And I have to paint all four nerves."

Four nerves! I was definitely on my last one. However, I dutifully winched open my mouth. He dipped a giant q-tip in something and painted my tooth. Instantly, pain shot down through my jaw into my spine, shattering my vertebrae as it went. I whimpered a tiny bit until the pain receded. 

"Hang on," he said and painted another part of the tooth. 

I groaned. I'd never experienced pain like this in my life. Worse than being socked in the jaw by my older brother. Worse than falling nose first onto concrete (also courtesy of my older brother). I realize now how fortunate I have been to have escaped serious pain until age 67. My luck had just run out. 

He painted another part of the tooth. I gripped my own hand and dug in. I would have drawn blood if I'd had any fingernails. The pain was excruciating. I could not help moaning. One of my moans turned into a despairing chuckle.

"People don't usually laugh when I do this," he said. Then he painted another side of the tooth. At that point, I wasn't sure if I was going to pass out, choke on my own spit, or have a heart attack. Any of those would have been fine with me if they would just lead to a cessation of pain.

"Almost done," he said and came at me again. The word torture crossed my mind several times. 

Finally, the tooth painting was over. He slapped the temporary back on and let his assistant deal with my trauma while he went to take care of his next patient. My woes had put a serious dent in their schedule. I successfully resisted the urge to apologize. 

I staggered out the door. The taste in my mouth, the smell in my head, the pounding in my jaw . . . I wasn't sure if I was going to make it to my car. I gagged a couple times, and prepared myself to hurl into the dirt beyond the curb. Gradually, the pain settled to a one-mule kick in the jaw instead of a twenty-mule team kick. I got into my car and thought maybe, just maybe, I might make it. 

Within five minutes, I was feeling great. Well, great in comparison to what I'd just experienced. Being relatively pain free compared to enduring the most horrendous pain I'd ever felt in my life is the most amazing kind of freedom. Going through such exquisite gut-wrenching pain and emerging victorious made me feel like I could do just about anything.

Which is a good thing, because on Friday, I was back in the hot seat for the permanent crowns. I was apprehensive but the prospect of finally having two crowns and a lovely bridge in between was a siren call lulling me into believing everything would be okay. Call it vanity if you must. I just really wanted a tooth back in that gap. 

"Do you want novocaine?" the assistant asked me. 

I felt my body clench from jaw to pelvis. "Do you think I should?"

"It shouldn't hurt much," she said. "Most people don't need it."

I grimaced, not wanting her to think me a wimp. "Okay, let's try it." 

It took over an hour for the dentist to grind the new appliance into shape so I could bite without breaking my jaw. In and out, in and out, pressing hard, youch, bite now, bite and chew, bite, bite, bite, okay. Check the little paper. Grinding, polishing, grind some more, bite bite bite. 

"This a strange form of sculpture, isn't it?" I mused during one short grinding break. It occurred to me, I probably would have made a good cosmetic dentist, back in my younger days when my eyes and hands were cooperating. 

"You have a deep overbite," he said. 

"You make it sound like that's a bad thing," I said. 

"If you don't mind . . . " he said and proceeded to grind some of the enamel off the upper teeth on that side. Whatever, I thought. It's on the inside, nobody will see. 

After an hour and a half, we agreed the bite was satisfactory. 

"The cement will be cold," he warned. He loaded up the glue and jammed the new bridge home. 

"Yow!" I grunted incoherently as he held the thing in place and zapped it with a blue light to cure the glue. Irradiated and in misery, all I could do was lie there and hope I would not choke on my own saliva. Breathe, I told myself, just breathe.

This back and forth had taken longer than expected. He was running way late. Once again I resisted the urge to apologize. Finally he unclipped my bib. As I wobbled to my feet, he told me I needed to get a special kind of floss to clean under the bridge so I wouldn't get tooth decay there, causing the whole thing to fail. 

And then he was gone to the room next door. I heard him welcome his patient with a jovial tone, as if he hadn't just spent a tedious hour installing an edifice over the chasm in my jaw. I thought, maybe he just really likes his job. Later I found out he was starting a week's vacation the next day. 

Since then, pain comes and goes. It moves around. The brutalized tooth seems quiescent. However, my jaw hinge throbs sometimes, and the nerves that he shot with his nasty silver needle ray gun sometimes quiver with rage. My neck has knots like the bumps on an alligator. I wonder if I will ever be the same.

Good news: ibuprofen. Other good news: lousy memory. By the time the next dental crisis rolls around, I will probably have forgotten how it felt to experience the worst pain of my life.  Someday soon, I predict I will be chomping apples on that fake tooth without a care. Even if I reread this blog, I won't remember the depth of my misery. It will all blend into one traumatic experience that I survived. The silver lining in the ongoing old age slow-motion catastrophe that is me.   

Going with the punches

Here we are again. I'm here for my weekly therapeutic blog dump. Stand back, all four of you blogbots, so you don't get spattered. Urp. Hm. Tastes like chicken. The theme of this week is teeth. Like, mainly, how annoying it is that they don't heal themselves. My car's check engine light actually has a better chance of self-healing (as long as I give it decent gasoline) than my teeth do. How come bones can heal but teeth can't, riddle me this. 

Three years ago, you might recall, a root canal went gunnysack, and I had to have the tooth extracted. It was less than a month before my move to Tucson. Implants were booked out weeks. So I moved house, proceeded to figure out life in the desert, and gradually got used to having a gap in my jawline. 

After so long of chewing on empty air, I thought, it's past time to get a bridge over the yawning chasm. It would be nice to chew food there again, if possible. Besides, the two teeth on either side were cracked and in need of crowns anyway, and insurance was paying for half, so I figured now was the time. 

On Monday I coughed and moaned like the stoic trooper I am while the dentist and his assistant did their best to choke me with my own spit. After two hours of grinding, I came away with a white blob of something that resembles silly putty covering the two brutalized teeth and the gap in between. It hurt for a day and then stopped hurting, and I thought, yay. Then it started hurting again, and now it feels like a squabble of angry worms are drilling tunnels through my jaw. It took a trip to the storage unit, but thank god, I found my acetaminophen and ibuprofen, yay, so the worms are sedated to a sluggish writhing. 

My friend noticed I seemed a bit under the weather on a recent Zoom call. Her partner is a retired medical professional, which means he has lots of knowledge and even more opinions. I appreciate both. He suggested I call the emergency after-hours number. I stared at the phone for a while, feeling reluctant to admit I might need some help. Finally, I called the office number, got the office recording, and wrote down the emergency number. After the beep, I left a whiny message. I don't feel so good. Then I sat around moping for a bit, wondering if this amount of pain constitutes a "true dental emergency," which is the requirement before you call the after-hours desperation hotline. However, I knew my friend would be checking on me, and I sure didn't want to be scolded by the medical professional partner for being too stoic, so I called the emergency number. I got a recorded message from my actual dentist himself. I was kind of relieved. I imagined he was out enjoying a lovely meal with this wife or maybe resting up for another week of jamming his hands into slobbery mouths. I would have been flustered if he had answered the phone in person. Sorry to bother. 

So far, no call back. 

Part of me is like, well, this is how it goes for me. Life comes at me swinging, and I either cave or pretend to cave and then pop up like a bobo doll, smirking I know you are but what am I. Right now I feel kind of crappy so I don't have the energy to bounce back to my feet. I'm more like a beached humpback whale, rolling with the flow and hoping the tide and a few valiant surfers will shove me back out to sea. 

I will feel better eventually, I am predicting, and then I can get back to the all-important task of jumping off a cliff. Eyes on the prize, people. 

Gnashing and grinding our pearly whites

 Hello to my six (sometimes seven) readers. You know who you are, even if I don't. Thanks for taking time. We are all busy, it's hard to keep up with my escapades when you are no doubt dealing with your own challenges. Send me a link to your blog. I promise to subscribe. Meanwhile, because you are here, let me catch you up on the progress of my move.

It seems the entire city of Portland, after a year of gnashing and grinding their pearly whites, has decided it is safe to venture a visit to their dentists, who immediately sent everyone out for tooth extractions. I guess it's a thing. My dentist is capable of taking out my infected tooth, but during the consult (no charge), she mentioned that an oral surgeon could do a bone graft in case I wanted an implant to replace the tooth. She doesn't do bone grafts, and she clearly wanted me to get an implant because that is how she makes her real money. In an idle moment, I looked at her website: cosmetic dentistry is her specialty. I get it now. All this time she's been grooming me. She took care of my mother, who ended her life with a full upper and a partial lower—my dentist probably sees dollar signs every time I smile and reveal my receding gums.

I didn't want to make her feel bad, so I listened to her sales pitch about my options, thinking to myself, lady, no offense, but there is no way I will spend $6,000 to get a tooth screwed into my head. That is how much I paid for my Ford Focus, just saying. I'd rather have a car than a fancy white tooth any day. I admit, I might have felt differently if it had been a front tooth. I pretend I don't care how I look but I don't want to give my brother a reason to call me Snaggle Puss. 

After the consult, my dentist gave me a referral to an oral surgeon and told me to tell them I'm in pain, really lay it on thick, to motivate them to get me in sooner rather than later. Accordingly, I made the call and whined to the oral surgeon's receptionist about how much pain I was in, waaahh, poor me, and she said, "I have an opening on April 23," as if appointments were a scarce asset and she was doing me a huge personal favor. Then she asked, "Are you on antibiotics?" 

"Why, no," I said.

"Oh," she said, packing a lot of meaning into one small sound. I'm great at interpreting tone of voice. She was saying you can't be in that much pain if you aren't on antibiotics and what kind of fly-by-night dentist did you see who didn't immediately prescribe antibiotics? Loser. 

I aimed a half-hearted eyeroll into my phone, in too much pain to really care. I wanted to use my own snarky tone of voice to imply who are you calling a loser, clearly you don't keep up with the latest scientific literature, which says antibiotics are only necessary for patients with heart conditions or heart valve transplants. Loser, yourself. 

Not worth the trouble. It takes precious energy to be snarky when your jaw is throbbing. After disconnecting, I called my dentist's office. Sandi always answers the phone. I think she lives there.  

"Wah, wah, wah," I said, or something similar, I forget. 

"Oh, poor thing. I'll talk to the doctor and call you tomorrow," Sandi said.

Two days and many ibuprofen later, I got a call from Sandi. "I've checked around and no one has any appointments for three weeks. I don't understand it." 

"I cannot survive three more weeks of this," I said. We made an appointment for the next day for the dentist to do the extraction. 

I was nervous, not sure why. I've had braces—four teeth were culled to make room in my tiny head for the rambunctious survivors, so I'm no stranger to extractions. However, that was a long time ago, when I was certain the universe was not out to get me. Now I know better. 

The assistant took my blood pressure with a gizmo around my wrist. Do those things work? I'm skeptical. She told me the numbers, which never make sense to me but I know any number above 130 is bad. My number was a lot higher than 130. "That is very high, isn't it?" I said. 

"Yes, it's a little high," she agreed. I looked around for a crash cart, just in case I had a heart attack during the procedure. Then I thought, what the heck. There are worse ways to go than lying in a comfy chair surrounded by nice people in masks. 

The dentist came in. The fun began. After one glance at the gigantic plunger of Novocain, I shut my eyes and didn't open them again until I was so numb I wasn't sure I had a jaw anymore. I clasped my hands in my lap in a death grip, felt the waves of vertigo ripple around my head, and hung on for dear life. Once my face fell off, I was fine. The actual extraction was a breeze. A couple yanks, and it was over. 

"Bite on this," she said. "Do you want to keep your tooth?"

Half my face managed to chuckle. 

That was Friday at noon. It is now Sunday at 9 pm. I have discovered that the only way to survive this ordeal is to take the recommended dosage of over-the-counter pain relievers. Half-doses left me sweating in agony during the night. No more of that. I only have so many tank tops. 

On the bright side, I have almost bought a car! It's big, it's white, and it's a beast! Tucson, here I come.