It's your teeth, stupid.

It started with some small area of gum recession around one of my back molars. It didn't really hurt but I could suddenly see the root to my tooth. So I reluctantly, extremely reluctantly, went to see my dentist who I hardly ever see because when I see her, nothing good ever happens. Even though she's talented, smart and rational. I don't like consuming any medical care whatsoever. Admittedly, often to my own detriment.

And sure enough she pulls my cheek out and looks at the back molar, clucks her tongue, and takes a metal probe and sticks it in the hole. And now, it fucking hurts! She says she thinks there's something bad going on underneath that old amalgam filling from 200 years ago. I tell her that I like that amalgam filling, because it has poisoned my brain with mercury for decades, likely atrophying my frontal lobes and making me a much calmer person. A dental induced frontal lobotomy from my perspective.

So she takes some x-rays and tells me to say goodbye to my amalgam filling and furthermore to say goodbye to that tooth which is rotted underneath. I don't understand it at all. I did everything I was supposed to. I drank alcohol to kill all the bacteria in my mouth, ate lots of chocolate which has very high amounts of antioxidants, and spent a lifetime eating spicy barbecue which is also extremely toxic to bacterial life forms, especially the capsaicin from the hot sauce. None of it worked. I guess all that talk about dental cleanings and flossing had a speck of truth to it. No matter. Off to the oral surgeon I went.

At the oral surgeon's office, everybody was so happy and cheerful behind the reception desk. The people in the waiting room were definitely not happy and cheerful and looked as miserable as I was. There's a huge disconnect there. I know as a physician that you're supposed to be pleasant and supportive to your patients, but when it comes to dental pain, I really don't want to hear a lot of bubbly, smiling people talking to me. I want people with sad and compassionate looks of grief and misery. No matter. I was deluged with happy faces.

So they gave me 450 pages of paperwork to fill out, asking me background medical questions, including boxes to check for every known disease to mankind, including the worm that can eat your brain. But I did my best. Finally they came out and called me and brought me into this pretty large room that looked like the surgical suite for a frontal lobotomy that I already told you has been performed by my mercury filling. All the assistants were running around getting trays ready and preparing everything for what I'm sure they considered an incredibly mundane procedure for an oral surgeon, more used to implants and reconstructive jaw surgery.

She came in and introduced herself. Me being an old fart, she seemed awfully young, and in the back of my mind I decided that maybe this was her first extraction. So I said to her, “So I take it you've done this before? This isn't your first one is it?” She punched me in the arm which actually made me feel better.

She looked at the X-ray and clucked her tongue like my dentist did. I felt like they were blaming me for my own tooth rotting. When she came back I said that all I cared about was that she pulled the tooth out and I didn't get a dry socket. Which is a complication after a dental extraction that is among the most excruciatingly painful conditions you can get. She looked at me and told me that I would be fine and not to worry. Which of course is the kiss of death.

We chatted a bit, since it turned out that we had trained at the same university for portions of our respective training. She seemed to do a good job though. Which is a ridiculous statement to make. How the hell do you know if someone has done a good job when they rip your tooth out? I mean they're holding this tooth and presumably it went well but for all I know she broke my jaw because the whole side of my face was numb and I would never have known.

So I'm sitting there with some blood drooling at the side of my mouth, since it's so numb that I can't even feel if it's closed or open. She's just chatting away, having a wonderful conversation while I have a piece of gauze stuck in my mouth and answering in incoherent garbled verbiage. But she clearly has practice at this because she seems to understand the words that are coming out of my mouth even though I can't even understand the words coming out of my mouth. Or perhaps she just always smiles and nods her head in agreement no matter what the patient says, as long as they are not screaming. I have no idea.

So I go home, really looking forward to my diet of liquids and pureed baby type food. And on day four, the motherfucking clot falls out and I have a dry socket. And from my perspective, the whole healing process is not going that smoothly. I'm healing like an elderly man. Of course I am an elderly man so I should have suspected.

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Fortunately, for unknown reasons, I didn't have the psychosis-causing excruciating pain normally associated with the condition. Just a dull continuous ache with a throbbing headache that really wasn't that much worse than watching the news on TV. I'm thinking the killer pain will be coming later since the healing is slower than expected, making me think that the pain coming on will be slower than expected.

On the weekend of Thanksgiving, I called the on-call surgeon, just to touch base, which the instruction sheet says to do when the clot falls out. He very cheerfully tells me that as long as the pain is not excruciating, that there's really not much to do. As long as it's not infected. I tell him I don't think it's infected, but what the hell do I know about dentistry. I can barely see in there via a mirror. Anyway, we chat a bit, and make the unanimous decision to do nothing and wait. Which is extremely easy for him because he certainly doesn't want to come and see my pathetically healing tooth. And frankly, I really wasn't in the mood to go driving in to have someone stick another probe into the hole.

So now I'm sitting here writing this post which I was going to put off but decided to do anyway, with a gaping hole in my gums that to my mind is barely healing at all. God, I really am elderly. And I'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop and for excruciating pain to go shooting through my brain and into my ear. I absolutely know it's coming. This is definitely not the end of the story.

I don't expect a lot of sympathy because when I looked it up, apparently, dental disability is the most prevalent disability in the world with approximately half of the world's population suffering from it. That's 3.9 BILLION people. Most of whom don't have the luxury of a dentist and an oral surgeon and are generally missing lots of teeth and have all sorts of horrendous oral pathology.

But when I get a toothache and I have a tooth pulled, I don't think about those billions of people, because I'm pretty sure they're not thinking about me. They're miserable with and focused upon their own dental issues.

Because it may be that your mouth and lips suck, but dental pain sucks worse.