Mouth Drama

If I believed in past lives, I would really think that I must have been something horrible. Perhaps I was a vampire. A cannibalistic serial killer. A rattlesnake with a vendetta. All of this bad karma has come back to bite me, quite physically, in the mouth.

In the fourth grade, my dentist dropped a bomb on me: I need braces. For an awkward nine year old in a small school where NO ONE ELSE wears these contraptions, this is truly the end of the world. I begged. I pleaded. I cajolled. I bargained. I still ended up with braces. Being as I was little, I had absolutely no say in the matter. What I remember most about this experience, is this fabulous (read: oh my god what is that?!) little device which my orthodontist lovingly called a "tick-tick." This cute sounding mechanism was meant to take those rounded back brackets that enclose the molar and, like a jackhammer, pound them into the subject's jaw. It is called a "tick-tick" because during these moments of excrutiating pain, there's this unpleasant ticking sound as a reminder of just what is going on in there. This happened eight times. It happened eight more time about halfway into the treatment because they had shaken loose, since the doctor didn't think to put any glue under them the first time. Or the second, for that matter. The happiest day of my life was when these were removed, and I was instead given this hockey-puck mouth guard to chew on, and later a removable retainer.

When I was thirteen, I went to a camp for two weeks. I stupidly left my retainer at home, but was assured that two weeks without it wouldn't hurt. I returned to find that the dog had gotten it out of its case and managed to break both pieces in half. As it was apparently unacceptable to simply glue them back together (for reasons I still don't understand), I gave it to my parents, told them what happened, and asked when I should get a new one. For the life of me, I don't remember what they answered, but somehow I never got a new one. Cue several years of my dentist harping on ME because of this. I'm thirteen, what am I supposed to do about it?

These years of torment from the dentist and harping of my parents by me yield no results. My teeth revert back to genetics, but this time there's a twist: the gums are receding! I need braces to push them back in line to keep them from falling out, no longer just for cosmetic reasons. Most of you know that I have since received braces, and that my teeth hurt me monthly for about a week at a time. You also know that I had a moment of glory when I found that use of the tick-tick device has been almost universally stopped.

The panic came when the orthodontist told me that braces probably wont save the two precarious teeth. I need a skin graft, or extraction. Not all that keen on losing more teeth (I had about four pulled in the third grade; did I leave that out? It was surprisingly uneventful, as was the removal of my wisdom teeth, sans of course discovering I'm allergic to codeine when it made me vomit twice and I had to clean out my incisions. But I digress), I decided that skin graft was the way to go. There is a previous post concerning this, and I will leave it to your discretion whether or not you want to read it. It's a little disgusting. Suffice to say that it was painful, scary, and horrible, and I spent a whole month post-op worrying that it was going to fall off. I'm better now; I'm even okay with flossing and brushing normally. Finally.

Sometime in November, before the gum graft and immediately following the placement of braces, a little bubbled formed on my top gums near one of my incisors. It looks like a pimple. Can a person get a pimple on her gums? I asked the orthodontist, who had never seen anything like that "in his twenty five years of dentistry." I was a little freaked out. He referred me to an endodontist, whom I saw yesterday. Now, I'm a lot freaked out.

He took an x-ray of the area and showed it to me. A verbal artists rendering goes like this:
tooth, root, bone. tooth, root, bone. tooth, root, GIANT BLACK SPACE, little bit of bone. Tooth, root, bone. This giant black space is an infection. Apparently, at some point in the past, I was hit in the face, jarring the tooth and killing the root. Somehow, the dead root got infected. Since the root is dead, bloodflow to the area for infection removal is impossible, so it festered (that's right, I used the word fester!). So, here's what happens now: more gum surgery.

It goes like this:
1. Local anesthetic, and an incision along the gum line at the problem tooth.
2. The man removes the infected tissue
3. He places a little enforcer in there so the tooth doesn't dislodge.
4. They close it up and send me home in massive amounts of pain.
This costs me a lot.

Another scenario is this:
Repeat steps one and two.
3. He notices that there isn't enough bone to promote good healing.
4. He does a BONE GRAFT, or uses artificial bone to bulk up the area.
5. He places a little enforcer so the tooth doesn't dislodge.
6. They close it up and send me home in larger amounts of pain.
This costs me a lot more.

Another scenario is the same as the above, but replace "bone" with "tissue." Repeat price.

Still another is the scenarios above COMBINED. This costs... a lot more than a lot more.

The final scenario is that all of these are impossible and the tooth has to come out and I need an implant. That's right: implant. Lucky for me, my dad works in implants. I'd save some money cuz he'd likely give it to the guy for free (provided he even uses the type and knows how to do it himself).

I don't know what I did. The other areas of my life are fine. In fact, I'm frequently referred to as "cosmically blessed" or "that girl with a horseshoe up her butt." All of my bad karma is taken out on my mouth. Or in my mouth, whichever is more appropriate. So tell me your karma problems. I'll send you good X-karma if you'll send me good mouth karma. Good karma makes the world go round. Let's help it go a little nicer.