The Tooth Will Out

Last year, I developed one heck of a toothache. The pain had mostly subsided by the time I got myself in to see my dentist, so I thought “It must have just healed on its own,” because I can be hilariously optimistic and naive when it comes to my health. My dentist looked at the tooth, in the back of my lower jaw, and said “Yeah, you need to have a root canal.” My first root canal! How exciting! (I’m being very liberal in the use of “exciting”, especially considering my high anxiety around all things dental.) She gave me a referral to an endodontist and I made an appointment. The endodondist and his staff were incredibly nice, which helped keep me calm during the procedure. Which the endodontist wasn’t able to finish because it turned out my tooth was too far gone for a root canal. The little guy needed to be extracted. This did not make me happy.

For one thing, I don’t like the idea of my mouth being toothless, even by one tooth. It’s not that it makes me feel old, it just makes me feel like I’ll be…incomplete. For another, well, when I was in middle school, it became clear that I’d need braces, but I had eight baby teeth that still hadn’t fallen out and they couldn’t put braces on me until all of my adult teeth had grown in. So I had to have four tooth extractions, two at a time, done by a dentist with bad bedside manner who I had never felt comfortable around. The experience left me kinda sorta traumatized and I’ve gone long stretches of adulthood without seeing a dentist because just setting foot inside a dentist’s office gave me the willies.

But what could I do, let an infected tooth just keep being infected and spreading that infection to my other teeth like someone at a New Year’s party spreading…an infection…okay, this simile got away from me. Point is, I had to suck it up and take care of it. My dentist gave me a referral to an oral surgeon, I made an appointment for a consultation, and it went well. I liked the surgeon and his staff, he explained in great detail how they would extract the tooth, build up a bone graft around the socket, and implant a new tooth. Made of titanium. This quickly shifted me away from “I’m scared about all of this” to “I’m going to have a titanium tooth in my mouth! I’ll almost be a cyborg! COOL!” Unfortunately, this was a process that would take months. Like, have the tooth extracted, wait three months, have the implant base put in, wait another three months, screw the implant into the base, then make an appointment with my dentist to have a crown put on the implant. In the meantime, I would have to make do with a missing tooth, chewing only on the other side of my mouth, and constantly sticking my tongue in the empty spot to marvel at how weird it felt to not have a tooth there.

Finally, FINALLY, I went to my appointment today to get the replacement tooth screwed into the base. But there was a complication. When the oral surgeon first explained the process to me, he told me it was only 2% of the time that the implant wouldn’t take, so there was little to worry about. This became dramatic foreshadowing because today, he discovered the implant didn’t take. Instead, he removed it and talked to me about trying again. He was very apologetic, said he wouldn’t even do the procedure if the failure rate was higher than 2%, and finally, with exasperation, said, “We just don’t understand everything about the human body.” So I’ve made an appointment to come back in to see if my jaw is good for another try and if it is, we’ll try again. That next appointment is in November, a year after I first got the tooth extracted.

I know this is just how science is. We don’t understand everything about anything. Sometimes things fail, even when the odds are heavily on the side of them working. That’s life, and the technology and care are far better now than they were 20 years ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago…but at the same time, t probably goes without saying that I’m feeling quite sad and frustrated right now.