It Is So Over.

Courtesy David Shankbone, (Wiki.)

Louis Shalako

I screwed up some guts the other day.

I called and made a dentist appointment. It’s such a simple little thing. Most people take it for granted. But bear in mind that the Ontario Disability Support Program will pay for an extraction. They might even pay for a cavity to be filled. They don’t pay for dentures. They don’t pay for crowns, caps, veneers, or bridges, or any kind of cosmetic dental work.

Yet I can’t help but think that a little bit of cosmetic dental work might have been of some real benefit in a case like mine.

Sweating it out over six or seven days, there was never any real danger of me booking for the hills or failing to attend for the appointment. I’m not a little kid and I have some mastery over self.

The fact is that I went.

That’s not to say that I wasn’t a little nervous. What I wanted them to do, was to pull about twelve or thirteen teeth from the upper jaw. I wanted to get a fine set of plastic teeth, dentures.

I would like to enjoy that most simple and human of things: a nice smile.

My brother got his a few years ago. While they obviously look like store-bought teeth, the transformation was startling.

When I was about eight years old, my brother and I were fighting in the kitchen. We were fighting over a can of apple juice or something. He whapped me right in the teeth with it, chipping the upper left incisor.

When I was about ten years old, we were spinning around in the schoolyard, making ourselves dizzy and just having fun at recess. Kids do that sort of thing. Falling flat on my face, I took a real big chip out of the upper right incisor. Half the tooth was gone.

The doctor patched it up with plastic paste, which was all very well although he didn’t do a very nice job of it. It always did look clunky, discoloured, and I suppose teenagers are at their most self-conscious. I always knew it was there.

Let’s not get too deeply into the personal history, but I went through a pretty rough time. It went on for years. I neglected my teeth. At some point I had a rotten molar, and it didn’t taste very good. It smelled bad. Every time I ate, it would hit the nerve and the pain would go on until I took narcotic pain pills such as Tylenol 3. T-3s have 30 mg of codeine. When I finally worked up the nerve to get it pulled, it turned out I had a staph infection from the tooth. You get it from eating improperly washed produce, or improper hand-washing in food preparation. 

It took two different regimens of antibiotics to clear that up, before the doctor would pull the tooth.

My breath cleared right up. Even the smell of my farts changed. The staph was living in my gut and it changes the body chemistry. Imagine how hard it is to talk to people, when you know damned well your breath smells like shit.

At that time, the dentist fixed one cavity, but I really don’t drink a lot of pop and eat a lot of candy. I hadn’t seen a dentist in ten or fifteen years. That was six years ago. Okay, I’m a bit of a gagger and no one likes going to the dentist. But now, forty-five years later, that plastic patch on the upper incisor is porous. It’s a black tooth now, right out of Benny Hill and Monty Python. What with all the chips, old patches now about to crumble and fall out of the other incisor, it’s no wonder I wanted them all pulled.

It was six years ago, when I looked into caps, veneers, and implanted teeth. My old man was still alive, and I had some hopes of getting a little help to pay the $4,000.00 that a total of four veneers would cost. The dentist told me that with longitudinal cracks in the teeth, it wasn’t a good option. It was disappointing, but it was also going to be expensive, and at the time I just accepted that they weren’t going to do it. I basically just walked away because they wouldn’t give me what I wanted…

For forty-five fucking years I have lived with ugly teeth.

It really is a formative experience. It has helped to shape, in so many ways, just who I am—who I became for far too long there.

I am so fucking sick of it.

And of course we are so good about blaming ourselves, aren’t we?

I know what a pretty girl is—and I had this crazy idea they weren’t going to be too interested, in a guy with bad teeth. It’s not very appealing, is it ladies? I didn’t have too many other things going for me either—I’m not rich, and I’m not likely to get a real good job anytime soon. I’m not that charming, not that confident, not that good in social situations….and no wonder, when you know the facts.

Well, the bad news is they talked me out of it. We’re not going to pull twelve or thirteen teeth in one go. I’m not going to get my beautiful store-bought smile.

We’re going to drill down into that ugly old tooth. We’re going to do what the nice dentist says is best, and the worst part of it is, that I can’t even be unconscious when we do the work. 

With the white plastic paste, hopefully they can make it look all right…

Judging by the hour and a half I spent in that itty-bitty little chair, as they poked, prodded, tapped, pried, photographed, measured and collated, this might be a bit of an ordeal.

I have to assume that this is going to be worth it, ladies and gentlemen.

To go through life with the world’s second-biggest inferiority complex is over.

It is so fucking over, ladies and gentlemen.

And in a month or two, after two or three appointments, this will be over too.

In the meantime, I will try not to be too scared shitless.

END