Where Are My Teeth?

In which I have a funny mouth

That was what my dentist said today while speculating on why the decay-detecting gup she was swabbing into the bottom of some newly-unfilled cavities was staining a new shade of turquoise or aqua rather than the navy blue it does in most mouths. Of course, I should be glad enough that I'm not one of the people for whom it goes black...

Our best guess is that the color is pH-dependent, but that's hard to check. She tried to get some litmus paper for another patient once, but the only stuff she could find was nowhere near accurate enough to measure the difference between a happy mouth at pH 6.2 and enamel dissolving before your eyes at pH 5.5 (well, at least that's what these people say).

Meanwhile, until my mouth "thaws" I'm not supposed to eat anything, or if I do eat something (and I did) to make if very soft, like yogurt (it wasn't merely like yogurt, it was yogurt). And tonight, still no hard food. I have specifically been warned off beef jerky, alas.

The whole experience was a sort of jolly dog's breakfast. The receptionist is on vacation in the caribbean, and the nice german assistant who sometimes fills in at the desk was home throwing up with a migraine, so things were running a bit late.

My dentist tried a fancy technique called a mental block -- no, she hasn't learned to become a vulcan -- in which you inject the anesthetic into the mental foramen, one of the channels through the lower jaw that carries nerves and blood vessels. When it works, it knocks out sensation to the teeth without sending your tongue and lip to sleep and making you drool uncontrollably over everything.

Didn't work.

As soon as the #4 roundhead burr started chewing into the amalgam I could feel it, and I politely raised a hand, palm forward, in the universal gesture for "Stop! You're about to kill me!" So she shot up that really painful spot in the back of the jaw where all the nerves come together (it felt, in addition to the usual discomfort, like a dozen needles were suddenly puncturing my tongue) and soon everything was properly numb. Still is, four hours later...

Meanwhile, as she and her assistant were adjusting the medieval torture instruments to be placed in my mouth, she noticed the dark scar on my lower lip and thought it might be a bit of amalgam. I explained that it was instead the result of a tragic marching-band accident, and we swapped musical-incompetence stories. (She wanted to play flute or piccolo, but there were too many of those already, so the band director handed her a french horn and sent her off to the boys' bathroom to learn to play it. She never really did, and marched with the moutpiece out for safety's sake. Her sister actually knew how to play the alto clarinet, it seems, but at 25 cents a reed in those days and marching tending to break a lot of reeds, the expense began to add up. So she took the reed out and hummed the national anthem and fight song instead.)

Oh, yeah: not only is my mouth funny, but the old filling was funny too -- during the drilling it disintegrated into shards of metallic confetti that went every which way ("Do you see that one in his hair? Suction it up."). I must have a word with Dr Foster.

Fastforward. (Uh-huh) It would be just my luck to get a dodgy batch of amalgam, so halfway through the final shaping pieces started chipping off pie wedges. So out with the burr again (up to a #6 by now) and back again with the bands...

As we were scheduling my next appointment -- tell me why I bother having teeth at all -- someone delivered a huge hanging philodendron, a gift to the assistant from her fiance.

Posted by wallich at November 5, 2003 03:53 PM