Been trying to think of stuff to write about for ye olde newsletter. It all feels lackluster, so here’s a blog about my teeth.
So I was at the dentist. The dentist is one of those few places where the “Find Out” portion of “Fuck Around and Find Out” reveals itself in a slow, permanent sort of way. Oh, you mean I shouldn’t have drank liters of soda for years as a child and teenager and young adult? At least if you drive drunk without a seat belt and get into a wreck, waking up without a leg the next morning feels earned. The slow, inevitable decay of one’s teeth is a visual representation of the slow, inevitable decay of your own body into eventual wormfeed. Welcome to my newsletter!
My teeth have been bad forever, and as a child I was terrified of the dentist. There was a dentist a couple blocks from my childhood home and I remember three things about it:
- They had a sit down Pac-Man arcade system that I enjoyed playing,
- The children’s play area entrance was an archway very low to the ground–the height for a kid to crawl into, basically. The top of the archway had padding so kids wouldn’t bonk their heads. I always thought that was crazy. What if a kid was choking in there? Would a parent have to army crawl into the room?, and
- The last(?) time I went there I was so terrified of whatever they were going to do that I had to rush to the bathroom to dry heave and ended up not getting any dentist work done that day.
My parents took me to this place when they could afford to; when they couldn’t, they took me to Terry Reilly Health Services, which is where poor people got their teeth fixed. You could tell the difference, even as a kid, between the “rich people doctor” and the “poor people doctor.” It’s all in the waiting area: the latter is louder, more chaotic, more children climbing over seats. More ethnic diversity at the poor clinic; lots of poor Latinos in southwest Idaho. Growing up, I always felt a kind of kinship with the Latino community, not because of music or culture or food (though the food is very good), but because we were both broke and just trying to get by, and I guess I saw that more with the Latinos than I did with my white friends and classmates. (Also it was Idaho, there were no Black kids to commiserate with about being poor.)
As an adult, I could probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve been to the dentist. The breakdown of why I didn’t go very often is simple: I was poor, and mandatory health insurance didn’t exist when I was young. There’s more to it than that–a bit of bad dental genetics mixed with a much worse hygiene regimen–but the simple fact is that I couldn’t go get cleanings and whatnot because I couldn’t afford it. If I could have, I would have, even if I hated it. I distinctly remember a day in college where, over the course of a few hours, an abscess grew in my lower jaw, enough that my girlfriend at the time warned me about it. The type of rock hard fluid trapped in a space it’s not supposed to be in. I think I got it taken care of, likely at Terry Reilly, though I can’t remember, because I’ve also had abscesses that I “took care of” myself because I A) didn’t like the dentist and B) couldn’t afford the dentist. I didn’t poke my gums with a needle, if that’s what you’re wondering about. But if you press against a pressured space enough, it will pop, and you will spend the next few minutes swishing water in your mouth constantly to avoid the taste. I won’t say any more than that, but I will say that if you get an abscessed tooth, please go to the dentist. That shit can get into your bloodstream and seriously harm or even kill you. I do not endorse anything I’ve done, tooth-wise, or also probably just anything in general about my life.
Then, in my 20s, my wisdom teeth came in. They didn’t hurt so I let them be, until they crowded my mouth so hard that they cracked molars further ahead in my mouth. I remember a very loud cracking sound when one of the molars broke. I didn’t even know that sort of thing was possible, until it happened. I had teeth shards sticking out of my gums until grad school, when I finally attended the dentistry school attached to Portland State University. I went there only because one day I was at the Cheerful Tortoise (PSU’s nearby shitty dive bar) and I took a bite into a cheeseburger and one of my teeth broke. I went to the dentist and told her that and she said, “Yeah, sometimes eating meat can cause a tooth to break.” In hindsight, I think she was being sarcastic. They pulled my teeth shards as well as one of my back wisdom teeth and the tooth in front of it; the wisdom tooth grew in at an angle and basically grew into the tooth ahead of it, ruining it. Lots of fillings in my back teeth, lots of ruin that could’ve been prevented.
Speaking of hygiene regiment … the 2010s were quiet but also likely the worst for my oral hygiene simply because there were times–weeks, months, years?–where I just didn’t care. I remember Patrick Rothfuss saying once that he has had friends who lost teeth due to depression and I get it. It’s hard to explain, that lack of desire that prevents you from accomplishing even the simplest tasks. Empty the dishwasher. Take a shower. Brush your teeth. And then the cycle of depression and anxiety, where you know you’re supposed to shower but you don’t care, but you know you should and because you’re not it’s making you anxious, which perpetuates the cycle. It’s not that I didn’t brush every day for years, it’s that I brushed more often than not, which was usually once in the morning. Once in the morning, sometimes + Portland’s lack of fluoride in the water = the gradual and continual decay of my mouth.
Then, the pandemic came, and you can just throw all the rules out the window. Whatever depression sat heavy on my chest starting around 2014 melted into my bloodstream by late 2020. I don’t think I need to go on.
A couple months ago, I was eating popcorn and one of my teeth broke. I knew it would happen; I knew that popcorn would betray me one day. It wasn’t the microwave kind either, it was the bagged pre-popped stuff. I don’t know why, but pre-popped popcorn always has the most egregiously dangerous kernels. The bottom scraps of the bag are like playing Minesweeper with your teeth, and I eat popcorn like someone in a trance.
A week after the Popcorn Incident, I was eating almonds and another tooth cracked, this one a fillinged molar. I knew popcorn would betray me, but almonds?! Now where would I get my easy source of protein and magnesium?
At that point the die had been cast. I had to go to the dentist. My work doesn’t offer a dental plan1, so I bought my own, because you have to have insurance, right? Why else would you get work done without insurance? Well, long story short is that my dental plan is one where you don’t get all the stuff right away. An “incentive” plan which has incentivized me to drive off a cliff. It makes the entire point of getting a dental plan for the purpose of dental repair absolutely fucking worthless. It did pay for my cleaning though, so there’s that. I basically have to have it for a year before it really kicks in, and the big stuff I need to do (crowns, root canals, etc) aren’t covered for at least six months, and then when they are covered they only cover 15% for the first year. Wow! Such luxury!
Insurance is the capitalist mafia, by the way. The only difference is that while the actual mafia breaks your actual knees if you don’t pay them, the capitalist mafia breaks your financial knees if you don’t pay them.
So anyway, I’m sitting here now, writing this with a root canal done and likely another one on the way. TV shows and movies really made me nervous about getting a root canal. They always presented it as if it is the worst thing ever, but mine didn’t hurt at all, even after the lidocaine wore off. I’m going to get a couple of crowns placed, but after the root canal my gums were too inflamed so they had to wait to seat the crown. The doc then drilled out the filling from the tooth behind my root canal tooth because of a cavity, which is where he discovered that there was a crack in the tooth and that it needed a crown as well. So currently I have some temporary sealant stuff on my teeth and will be back in a couple of weeks to get it fixed.
I dunno why I’m writing this. I find the entire experience incredibly embarrassing; it feels like stuff I should’ve dealt with decades ago, but I couldn’t because I was poor, which is also embarrassing. For some reason, writing about embarrassing things is cathartic for me. I guess. Or maybe you’re embarrassed about your teeth and me writing about it allows a bit of kinship in that. Teeth are absurd. We only get two sets and the second set we get until we die, and then we discovered how to basically inject sugar into our gums via the sticky tack that is Swedish Fish. Teeth have been bad since the Egyptians, for fuck’s sake, and probably before that too. We should be commiserating about our fucked up teeth!
That’s my life right now. Teeth time and car repairs. My car has been repaired, by the way, and I took it in to get some anti-theft thing installed on it the same day I went to the dentist.2 This is how it works for me: I have a whole lot of nothing most days, and then everything suddenly happens on the same day for no reason.
Anyway. Hi. Welcome to 2024.
- Lisa needs braces. ↩︎
- They also gave me The Club for free. I’m surprised these still exist but they do and lots of people in Portland use them. ↩︎