It's nice to know you'll be thinking of me at Christmas

Back in the 80s I found myself a super cheap dentist. My friend had been using him for several years, and since I have genetically poor teeth, I needed a dentist quite a bit, even in my twenties. For someone in her twenties I did a fairly responsible job of going to appointments, getting fillings and cleanings, all that.

Back in the 90s I learned the hard way that the nice dentist from the 80s didn’t actually have a license to practice dentistry, which explained the great prices. It also led to an extensive number of issues with the extensive number of teeth he’d drilled and filled. Four of those teeth now rest in Valhalla, after fighting the good fight but eventually succumbing to, “There’s only so much we can do,” and even my high pain threshold. They were replaced with expensive dental implants.

Yesterday morning I woke up to a blasting pain on the upper left side of my mouth. Recently I’ve been visiting my “new” dentist of 25+ years because a tooth on the lower left had been acting up, but this was upper. Where an implant was. It had been giving some warning signs of impending doom, but this was definitive. I called, my heroes said they could see me that morning, and I drove back from the Cape in record time, slowing down to hurl the dog into the house before arriving.

“Who put this in?” asked my dentist.

“It wasn’t you, it was the obnoxious French guy I fired, which is how I found you, remember?”

“Oh yeah,” he grunted. He grunted because he’d already removed the crown, and at this point had gone through every dental implement available and was now rummaging through tools that may have come from the trunk of his car to find some way to pull the post out of my head.

“I don’t have the right device to get this out,” he said, “it’s too old a model, so I’m trying to…Hmmm.” He sounded interested, which is never a good sign with a dentist. He then started MacGyver-ing things just out of sight behind my chair, occasionally reaching into my mouth with a tube, funnel, wrench, or particle accelerator he’d jury-rigged out of stuff from his pockets.

“Sorry about the pressure on your lip,” he said in the middle of things. There was no pressure on my lip at the moment, he was just hedging his bets and being polite. And letting me know what was coming.

At one point some eight-foot tube was wedged into my upper jaw.

“Unnngh..” I said.

“Yes, you can’t close your mouth,” he sort of absent-mindedly responded as he waved his hand and turned away to solder a marble to a piece of string and a beer tab. He wasn’t concerned.

Dental vice grips — I’m sure there’s an actual name for them that’s not that, but whatever — turned out to be the eventual answer, and Schrödinger’s implant, both loose and wedged tight, failing and impossible to remove, was out.

“I bet I know how this goes,” I said, “I put some sort of bone dust in there, send me home for a few months, and then I come back and we start all over again with a new post and - I don’t suppose you can use the same crown? I didn’t think so. And then a new crown.”

“Close enough,” he said. Then, to his assistant, “Would you open the cabinet please? I want to see what we’ve got.”

He spent a full minute studying his options, then selected one, a syringe filled with grafting material.

“What kind?” I asked.

“Monkey,” he said. “We wouldn’t want to get too far into the exotics with you.” He then asked for suture, and I groaned.

“So basically this is what I’ll be doing for the next ten days — playing with the stitches in my mouth with my tongue.”

“Yup,” he said, “It’s nice to know you’ll be thinking of me at Christmas.”

He’s a funny guy, my dentist, but this morning I woke up just fine, if a tooth short. A little sore, but considering yesterday I had the Hadron Collider in my mouth, I’m doing just fine.