Chomp

The Young Prince has his first loose tooth.  At least, he says it is loose. I can't really tell by watching him wiggle it or trying to move it myself, but I will take his word for it.

I don't remember when I lost my first tooth -- whether it was kindergarten or first grade. It seems like I've been waiting a long time for his teeth to start falling out, but maybe that's because I'm more used to dogs, who get that noise over with early?

Meanwhile, the old folks have been enjoying their own dental sagas.  Not Your Average Blogger has, to my mind, a horrible mouthful of bones. Just in the last round of visits he's had two crowns, plus a filling replaced.

Me? Never had so much as a cavity.  I've had dentists call me boring, tell me to go 2 years between checkups, etc. I had a horrible run-in with the administration at our last dentist -- four years ago -- when they wouldn't schedule me for a checkup and a cleaning on the same day, then lost my appointment when I went back TWO MONTHS LATER for the scheduled cleaning.

(WTF is it with dentists and cleanings? I can get in for X-rays with a day's notice, but I called for a cleaning the day before Halloween and they scheduled me after MLK Day. And I'm not even slightly exaggerating; I'm dead serious. Can't they invest in a few more hoses and scrubbers? It's absurd. And they never, EVER let me schedule a cleaning and a checkup the same day, which I find incredibly annoying. The last time I tried, the woman explained it is because they don't know "What kind of cleaning" patients might need -- if it's a 10-minute job or an hour. I say, schedule the hour and if it takes 10 minutes, call in some other poor sucker who's currently scheduled for next July 4. But ... whatever.)

Anyway, with all this tooth awareness in the air, I gradually become aware that something might be wrong with one of mine.  It kind of hurts when I bite down on the right side. Not a lot -- not even enough for me to pinpoint which tooth. Huh.  I look, but don't see anything.  And I figure, OK, my card is up, I suppose it's time for me to join the ranks of the drilled and filled.

So in I go. The assistant spends what seems like hours taking a jillion tiny little X-rays of chunks of my mouth. The dentist comes in and pokes around, and even manages to isolate which tooth hurts. "You probably have a cracked tooth and need a crown," he says. Hey, that's a term I recognize from NYAB's exploits. Then he looks some more and says, "But I don't see anything, so I'm not going to do any work." Um, OK? I guess I'll wait til it REALLY hurts?

Then he looks at my X-rays and jams some more fingers in my mouth and starts poking at things on the other side. "Does this hurt? This?" No, no, no. Nothing hurts on that side, are you trying to make that not be the case? Then he takes this flash-frozen Q-Tip and is all, "Can you feel that? That? That?" No, no, yes! No. Dude looks at me and says, without a trace of alarm or anything else, "Well, I have some concerns about this X-ray. All your teeth on that side might be dead."

!?!?!!?

He touches that damn Q-Tip to practically every tooth in my mouth, including the one that stung the first time, and I don't feel anything on any of them. Soooo ... ALL my teeth are dead?? 

He tells me to see an oral surgeon because he sees a weird dark mass on one of the 600 teeny X-rays the first woman took. And his parting salutation is, "And, you know, it's only one in a million that it's cancer."

I'm one foot out the door and that's the first time he tosses the C-word at me. Jayzez!

Fast forward to a week later, when the oral surgeon takes a panoramic X-ray, says, "It's an artifact. The bone is a bit denser on this side, so it looks darker. If people would stop taking these dinky little X-rays no one ever would have ...." and he trails off, so I finish with, "Scared the living hell out of me?"  He laughs and says, "Well, I was going to go with 'would have made that mistake,' but that sounded bad so I was amending to 'made that assumption'. But yeah, yours works."

Maybe it is good I won't get the cleaning until January. It may take me that long to work up my faith in the system.

Comments

[ardentdelerium]

I lost my first the summer between kindergarten and first grade. eating a starburst. at the beach.

Our dentist schedules cleanings and oral exams the same day all the time, and I don't think I've ever had a cleaning that wasn't followed by an oral exam, though they are generally brief. Email me if you want their info, though I think it might be a bit of a drive for you....

[lane]

Glad to hear it wasn't anything big! I'd been wondering.