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| 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
