Most adults have had some kind of work done on their teeth. In fact, most of the people you talk to on a daily basis probably don’t have all of their teeth. Maybe they have dentures, or maybe a few crowns, or even some bridgework. It’s incredibly rare to meet someone who has never had a dental problem. It’s all a part of growing up. Some people run into trouble earlier than others, and others luck out and get to keep all their chompers into old age.
I am of the former camp. Since extensive dentistry is a lot more common than one would think, I hope this serialized story will help people understand what it is like to go through something like this. Perhaps it will help someone, or perhaps this is a cautionary tale. You be the judge.
First, a confession: until recently, I had not gone to the dentist since I took the exam to get into high school. The reason I stopped going? Mostly it was fear. I don’t like people putting things into my mouth. But the big reason was that shortly afterward, I was no longer insured. I had been under my grandparents’ insurance, and they had to drop it. There was no way for me to get insurance at the time, and I never managed to get a job working for a company who would give me dental.
Until February 2008, when I was hired at my current job. By then, however, I figured that if there was something wrong with me, it was too late to fix. (Stop laughing. I can hear you.)
So, I went happy-assholing on my way until one day, somewhere back in October 2009, I started getting these really bad headaches. Imagine having gnomes with pickaxes hammering away at the inside of your skull, and you’re not even close to feeling what was going on with me. The pain ran up and down the right side of my face, from my jaw line to my temple. It was unrelenting. It started out every morning on my way in to work, it would continue through the night, preventing me from getting all but one hour of sleep.
I tried everything, but the only thing that seemed to have any favorable effect was booze, and I couldn’t have that at work. I muscled my way through my job every day, and as soon as I got home, I started hitting the bottle as hard as I could. If I was lucky, I was in a drunken stupor by seven o’clock in the evening.
But at work, there were times I seriously considered suicide, the pain was that bad. I was starting to fear that I had trigeminal neuralgia, which is a condition my grandfather has. It’s a stabbing, constant pain, and no one knows how it starts or how to cure it. Suicide sounded a lot more appetizing at that point. There was no way in hell I was going to deal with that for the rest of my life. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore, so I took the day off to go to doctors.
No one knew what it was, so my trigeminal neuralgia fears did not go away, but one doctor suggested that I go to a dentist, just in case.
I decided to make an appointment with the last dentist I had seen, the one from just before high school. We’ll call him Dentist One. When I showed up for my appointment, he did not remember me (no surprise there), but he was not pleased with the idea that I hadn’t sought care with anyone since I had seen him last.
After a few x-rays, he determined what the problem was right away: a piece of an upper molar was missing, and there was some heavy decay in what remained of the tooth. He numbed the area and drilled the decay. As he did this, he said there was the possibility that we’d need a root canal to fix this, but as it turned out, the decay had not reached the nerve yet. It was pretty damned close, though, as I saw when I looked at the x-ray. All it took was a quick filling, and the pain was all over.
But while he was in there, he noticed that I had a significant buildup of tartar on the backs of my teeth. I needed a deep cleaning, and it wouldn’t be fun. It was under my gum line, so they would have to go in with sharp tools to see what they could do about getting me back in action.
For the initial cleaning, they have what I best can describe as a sonic screwdriver (not the kind the Doctor uses on the BBC, sadly) which shakes heavy tartar away. It was shocking. It felt like they were knocking my teeth out, but when I saw the slivers of tartar, I was surprised that there was that much crap in my mouth.
Next came two separate visits, both for the deep cleaning. One would be to numb one side of my mouth, the other to get the other side. After the Novocain injections, everything went very well. It was kind of scary to see blood get suctioned out of my mouth through the clear plastic tube, but it was painless.
It was on the second cleaning visit that Dentist One decided to drop the bombshell on me: he had noticed a dark spot on my x-rays, and he had no idea as to what it was. He wanted to open it up a bit to see what was lurking inside that tooth. Since I was already numbed up, he set to work on me with his drill, and soon thereafter he had bad news.
“This one might have to go,” he said. “There’s a lot of decay in there. It came in from the side, which is highly unusual. I don’t know what could have caused it to happen.”
“Is there a way to save the tooth?” I asked.
“Root canal,” he said. “And even that is a bit iffy. I can’t see all of the decay, so I’m going to send you to a gum specialist. She’s going to perform a crown lengthening on you, and then you’re going to come back so I can take a better look, okay?”
I agreed. Next time, we’ll talk about what a crown lengthening is when we meet Dentist Two.
(The picture below shows me pointing out the trouble tooth.)
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