Dentists and Mortality

Yesterday I saw a dentist for the first time in nine years. No defense: I was in Asia between 1994-8, and bereft of anything resembling an actual health plan, but since 1999 I've been covered. So why the long delay?

True, I have no love for the dentist chair, the canned music and crinkled Sports Illustrated magazines, the inevitable dentist bad breath, that focused pale yellow light that hangs above you like some brainwashing device from Star Trek, the fugitive glimpses of my bloodied gums in the tiny rounded mirror shoved in my mouth. True, I've been through a few traumatic episodes. Once, when I was around ten, my dentist scolded me for whimpering in pain during a tooth filling. He died a year or two afterwards -- somehow those two events have become linked in my mind, cause and effect. Then there were the braces, those pincer-like retainers that still haunt my dreams -- I frequently imagine I'm back in high school, and maddeningly enough, my retainers come back with me. And then the time I got my wisdom teeth taken out in December of my junior year in college. Fortunately they knocked me out for that one, because all I remember is waking up bloodied, chewy reddened gauze everywhere, and then going to a school newspaper party, complete with open bar, downing four screwdrivers in half an hour, and later sitting through a showing of Heathers at the Brown Film Society, my head between my knees in agony the whole time. So the dentist hasn't been particularly good to me, but why nine years?

The answer occurred to me as the hygenist picked and pawed at my teeth, scraping off the deposits that had been built up over the past decade: I've always associated death with the state of my teeth. My disregard for a dental checkup mirrors my fear of confronting my mortality. I often dream about losing my teeth. It's a visceral sensation -- the idea that they're falling out, crumbling and cracking into dust. As the scraping went on and on, and it felt as if my teeth were getting pulled out by the roots, I reflected on the little dents and chips that have formed in my teeth over the years. They mark losses of innocence, of points of no return. Yes, that front incisor was chipped when I bit into that pebble in my rice that time in Beijing. Or: Yes, I'm missing a piece of that back tooth, thanks to the ancient silver filling putting too much pressure on the tooth. It all adds up to a history of continual erosion, of inevitable decrepitude, and sooner than I think, I'll resemble those toothless old men on the street, or be forced to wear whiter-than-white dentures. By that point I'll no doubt have also lost a few marbles.

When my dentist Dr. Picolotti asked me if I ground my teeth in my sleep, I told her breezily, Maybe once in a while, but I don't believe regularly, and believed it. Two minutes later, the awful truth: I did grind, incessantly, so much so that she recommended I get a mouth guard for when I slept (of course, said mouth guard is $350). Next week I must return for a temporary crown, and I do not look forward to the sawing away of the filling, that peculiar warm metallic smell as they sand down what is left of my original enamel, the buildup of saliva at the back of my throat even as the tiny tube they shove before my tongue sucks all moisture away. I've been entertaining an ache at this particular trouble spot for just under a week, and ask Dr. Picolotti what I can do in the meantime to alleviate the pain. She says, quite reasonably if not very sympathetically, that I should just take some Advil. When you come down to it, that's the answer to everything that ails in life. Take some Advil. And then eventually you'll be old, and maybe the natural novocaine of the brain will take over.