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. 

Things that don't heal by themselves

I've heard time heals all wounds. That sounds nice, but time doesn't heal everything. A few things come to mind. Cars. Teeth. Hearts. Money can heal some things, though. Cars, for example. If you have enough money to throw at the problem, you can definitely get that dreaded check engine light to go off. For a while. 

A business person once said something like, "I know half my advertising is wasted; I just don't know which half." I feel that way about car repair. When Charlie the mechanic says things like "Well, first we'll replace the coil, and if that doesn't work, we'll replace the fuel injector," it makes me suspect I just got a new coil for nothing. Not that you can't always use a new coil, but generally, I try to wait until I really need a new thing before tossing out the old one. It's the guess-and-by-golly approach. You guess, and if it works, you say, well, by golly! If it fails, you say, golly, sure screwed that up. The approach works, either way. After $2,300 worth of new everything, my car is running great. 

Another thing that doesn't heal by itself is teeth. Repairing teeth chews up a lot of money (ha, see what I did there). As I lay stiff as a board in the chair, with a drill, a water pick, a suction hose, and four hands in my mouth and the whine of the drill blasting my eardrums as it ground #3 and #26 to smithereens, I had a solid two hours to really savor the feeling of money being siphoned out of my bank account. I kept picturing the moment when I would be sitting at the receptionist's desk, pulling out my debit card. While I suffered in the chair, I couldn't wait for that moment. Once I survived the grinding and was actually pulling out my debit card, I felt somewhat less enthused. However, my deal is, I pay as I go for services rendered, even if they render me impoverished. How could I refuse? I got two new crowns for the bargain (Medicare) price of only $1,500. Such a deal. 

Speaking of dental deals, I hear that my insurance company has denied the $1,550 cost of last month's root canal re-do. I'm going to call them and weep into the phone, but I don't have a lot of hope. You can't petition the insurance company, not with prayer or anything else. The root canal had to be done, though, to save the tooth. So they say. Do we have to save teeth? I'm starting to think I'd look pretty good with dentures. I wonder if the dentist would let me customize them. Could I get them sharpened to points, maybe? That might come in handy in the upcoming zombie apocalypse, when I might be called upon to bite the throats out of water thieves. 

My bank account is starting to resemble Lake Mead—that is to say, a lot going out and not much coming in. I am not good at math, but even I know that is not sustainable. 

I knew this was going to happen. I was mentally prepared. Cars and teeth do not repair themselves. As long as I have the money, I will pay to maintain them. After that, it's baby food and bicycle. 

The other thing I'm thinking of that doesn't heal on its own is my heart. I don't mean that I'm grieving the losses of the past three years, although I am, and I probably always will miss my mother, my cat, and my sense of "home." I am actually referring to the actual meatball beating in my chest. Taking up yoga and jogging won't fix the valve that is gradually calcifying. My father used to lift weights to "muscle" his way through his maladies. It seems likely that I have inherited his genetic heart condition. I doubt if lifting weights is going to save me, any more than it saved him. But I understand his motivation. After a long walk, I feel a sense of sweaty accomplishment, like, yeah, take that, you stupid meatball. I'll outlive you yet, you just wait.

Speaking of dead, I'm pretending there will be a tomorrow, and I'm making plans accordingly. In a couple months, I'm going out in the world to seek my new home. Am I too old to go on a quest? I haven't heard that there is an age limit. This might be the adventure of my mediocre mundane lifetime. Or it might be the stupidest thing I've ever done. It's so hard to know ahead of time. Most of my bright ideas fall into the second category, but I've been lucky a few times before. It could happen again.