Over winter break, I permanently mutilated my body.
I did not shoot my eye out with a BB gun. I didn’t get a piercing or tattoo. I had a tooth pulled. I was in pain. It was an emergency.
I’ve had plenty of dental issues in the past, but this was a new low. I haven’t had health insurance for many years, let alone dental. Flossing was always more of an annoyance than a priority. Add a few years of heavy partying (i.e. drinking lots of carbonated mixed drinks and passing out drunk before brushing) and my teeth were in worse shape than ever.
About a year or two ago, a small part of a tooth chipped, probably an old filling. Due to my irresponsibility and inability to appropriate funds for preventive dental care, that determined little chip grew up into a massive cavity. Over break it manifested itself into a pain so intense and horrific, I would place it somewhere between childbirth and certain death.
When the dentist told me the tooth would have to come out, I took it in stride. As a teenager, my wisdom teeth were extracted with local anesthesia. I assumed having the death-tooth pulled would be a similarly trauma-free experience, and a relief from the pain-killer cocktail of vodka, hydrocodone and ibuprofen I’d been on for days.
I was wrong. The anesthetic certainly helped, but it couldn’t quite dull the sensation that my dentist was applying the whole of her body weight into my gums. After an eternity of yanking, wiggling and pulling, it finally gave. My eyes immediately welled with tears, and I started sobbing. Part of my body was gone forever, and I’d never be the same.
People are usually considered official adults somewhere around the ages 18 to 21, after getting a job, paying their own bills, finding a serious relationship and basic life-decision making. But once you’ve discovered that you’ve made a bad decision, or in my case, a series of them, you really start to get a handle on personal responsibility. I’m now officially an adult.
Between the emotional impact of losing a tooth and the social stigma of missing teeth, I’ve learned the hard way that I never want to go through that again. If I had listened to my dentist, or even my body, this never would have happened. My mother isn’t going to call the principal and get my tooth back for me. I was the one who avoided regular check-ups, and I was the one who decided to waste all kinds of time (along with money and brain cells) being out all night getting drunk for all those years.
The death tooth incident enters the same hall of fame as the time I canceled my car insurance, and then immediately got into an accident. Or the decision that pink hair was just the right choice for my senior portrait. I’ll just have to live with these decisions, but I floss now. Every day.
In addition to her weekly Free Press column, Amanda’s writing can be found and commented on at her blog.
Stop beating yourself up. Even if you had been religious in your brushing, flossing, and visits for dental prophylaxis every 6 months from birth, you could still have a renegade tooth that goes bad and requires expensive, emotionally distressing and physically distressing treatment. Some things are just beyond our control. Buck up, little buddy!
False. After brushing and flossing regularly for as long as it’s been my job to do so I can say that I’ve never had a cavity. Let alone a tooth that needed pulling. This was entirely preventable.