I’ll Go to The Dentist in My Next Life

As a kid I had the sort of teeth that you notice before anything else, like a car accident that someone had jammed into my maw. My mouth contained a pair of prominent front teeth, flanked on both sides by members of an unsightly over-bite and a pair of fangs that now would be quite in vogue given some of the recent dental enhancements I’ve seen—at least on the bus anyway.

I was talked into braces by my brother who likened the decline of my teeth to Lisa from the Simpsons, who in one episode is shown to have teeth that will one day grow right through her head, something that is illustrated by her kindly dentist in a series of speculative time-lapse photographs.

Later I had headgear that was so tight that it’s likely the reason I carry my head slightly forward of my body, and finally I had a retainer that I often left in napkins and accidentally threw out (leading me to become the kid in junior high who could be found digging through the trash in the common area; something that likely helped with my lack of popularity).

It was also thanks to my teeth that I got Percocets for the first time when I was fourteen. My wisdom teeth were so crooked that they’d had to break my jaw to get them out. I was put out for the ordeal and the dental team took out my teeth in pieces. I came to with an over-sized sock full of ice tied around my face, an apparatus that would later appear in photos that will no doubt be featured in a slide show should I ever get married. I suspect it was the Percocets that made me so amicable for posing in said photos, my cheeks swollen and my eyes nearly shut, as I rested my hands on my non-existent hips.

I spent so many years with someone’s finger digging around in my gums as they tried to deduce whether this incisor was overlapping the tooth next to it and what could be done about it. Now I feel that I have been in that chair so often that I can run from it until at least my next life. I am an over-brusher (something that is most likely wearing away the thin coating of enamel on my teeth that was not helped by my parents’ thoughts that immunizations and fluoride were bad for children) and I floss constantly, thinking that if I stay on top of things I will never again need to sit back and have a stranger peer into the depths of my opened maw.

In fact, I much prefer the gynecologist’s office because when it comes to doctors I like for there to be an impermeable membrane between us, even as I’m scooting my bare ass to the very end of the examination table. I have no idea what colour my gynecologist’s irises are, yet my previous dentist’s were a mad sort of blue that you couldn’t help but look at as he prodded around and told you that he was worried about gum recession.  

I recently admitted to a friend that the last time I’d been to the dentist was in Northern Thailand years ago. It had been something of a dental emergency that had made me go. The bottom retainer that had been cemented in my mouth some years previous had made its way out and now I had two rather sharp mounds of dental cement cutting holes in the underside of my tongue. I had gone, begrudgingly, to a dental centre to have them filed down.

I remember the days leading up to the appointment and how I could not sleep, but instead lay awake thinking of the possibilities, the most ridiculous of these being that I would wake up in the dentist’s office with an empty mouth, my teeth having already been sold and shipped elsewhere (this seemed not overly farfetched after I learned that the large house lizards in Thailand are killed for their brains which are then sold and ground into various medicinal powders and tinctures in China).

Yet at the dental appointment everything had gone according to plan. The good doctor had poked around only for a few minutes and then he’d filed the cement down to little flat stumps that I still worry with my tongue, often until it bleeds.

After the appointment I’d found the dentist outside, his hair now loose around his shoulders as lounged against a tree and bid me a good day. I realized on the way home that it had been a moderately pleasant experience to sit back in this relaxed dentist’s chair and find out that I wasn’t going to need to have all of my teeth filled. I decided that it was time to grow up and I resolved to find a regular dentist as soon as I returned to Canada. That was three years ago.