I recently went to a new dentist. I like to change every so often, thinking that someday I might find one who could work wonders without costing me an arm and a leg. I have horrible teeth. They were always straight, but there was a bite that caused them to wear each other out. They always say it is caused by grinding my teeth, but I don’t think so. I think it is just the way they hit each other. It is the same bite causing the wear on teeth that my father had to contend with. But, he died young so the wear didn’t get as bad as what I am experiencing. They are wearing off down to the gum. They can be fixed. But, the last estimate I had was $30,000.00 and that was nearly ten years ago. It would probably be more like $40,000.00 today and at my age, 66, with my level of health, fair to OK, I see no reason to spend that kind of money.
I credit my problems to the bite which is something my father passed down to me through his genetics. And, another thing I suspect may have contributed to it was penicillin. Penicillin had just been discovered, or invented, when I was born. Suffering from serious ear infections, I received 21 consecutive daily injections of this new wonder medicine as a tiny infant. I’m not sure this didn’t tend to weaken the enamel on my still forming teeth.
My latest dentist was doing a review of the condition of my teeth. There is not a tooth in my head that doesn’t have a cap or a crown or a filling. A majority of them have had a root canal. And still they look like they belong to a hillbilly from the mountains who has never seen a dentist. Or, a meth addict. He was inspecting each tooth and his aid was keeping notes. He was giving the number of each tooth when he came to an anomaly. He said it looked as if one was missing, however the space seemed to have filled with the other teeth pushing in. I told him there was one missing, it had been pulled when I was in my early teens.
It was my first visit to a dentist. A cavity had developed in one of my permanent molars and got steadily worse. It hurt from time to time with the pain getting more intense and more constant. Finally, one night I bit on a tube of toothpaste to squeeze out the last of the paste. Tubes of toothpaste in those days were made of aluminum rather than plastic and, for some reason I still don’t understand, chewing on aluminum will set off a toothache like nothing else. It hurt all night and the next day my mother announced she would be taking me to the dentist.
Roger Miller was raised in my small town. (Those who don’t know who Roger Miller is should ignore the foregoing sentence, or google his name.) He once said that we didn’t have a local drunk in Erick (our home town), so the boys took turns. That’s not really true; we had several. And Doc Bonefield, the local dentist, was one of them.
Mom took me to see Doc Bonefield the next morning. They lived in a nice house in town and his office was set up off the living room in what would ordinarily have been the dining room. Mom introduced us and told him of my complaint. He took me into his dental office, sat me in the chair and leaned me back. After laying out his tools, he stepped into an adjoining closet, retrieved a bottle of whiskey and took a large drink straight from the bottle. He returned and proceeded to pull the molar. Only one of us in that room had any deadening that day and it wasn’t the guy having his tooth yanked out.
I didn’t go back to the dentist for another twenty years. Another cavity resulted in an abscess. It was my own fault because I had discovered a toothache kit at the pharmacy and had used it to ward off the pain. I held off the pain all right, but it allowed the decay to get worse until the tooth could not be saved. Actually, it could have been saved but the dentist I used wasn’t much better than Doc Benefield. He liked to bend the tooth until it broke at the gum line; then he would cut the roots to separate them and dig them out individually. I lost two teeth to that barbaric treatment, but at least I enjoyed some deadening. The abscess was painful, but I was introduced to the wonder of codeine.
I eventually became concerned with the condition of my teeth and started seeking out better treatment. They look horrible and if anyone could see them, which I have learned to prevent, they would have no idea I have spent tens of thousands of dollars getting them to where they are today. I keep looking for a dentist to pull them and make me some dentures. But, they don’t want to do that. They all tell me what wonderful bone structure I have and how good the roots are. I haven’t been without pain in my mouth for ten or fifteen years, but I have great roots and bone structure. I recently changed dentists and asked the new one about pulling them. I got the same response, great bone structure and roots. He built them up some and improved them, but they still look like something from the 1920s or 30s.
I’ll bet Doc Bonefield would pull them.
No comments:
Post a Comment