4-15-02, Side Streets, Kimra Traynor Herb
My Aunt Bought a Screw in Tooth
By Kimra Traynor Herb
IPS Features
Last year, my
aunt went out and bought herself a screw in tooth. Everyone in the family
thought she had lost her marbles. This tooth cost like a zillion dollars, and
involved numerous visits the dentist. What kind of a crazy woman opts for fiscal
ruin and physical torture all in one purchase? I was right in there with the
folks who voted my aunt nuts for spending her hard earned money on such an odd
purchase. After all, the screw in tooth was way back in her mouth and no one
could even see the fake molar. The way I saw it, she could have bought a lot of
more high profile items and enjoyed them a heck of a lot more than a tooth.
I went along
like that, in my judgmental way for a few months. Until.......I got the
toothache of the century. Around Christmas, it began to throb. Then the tooth
began to thump. Finally, two days after Christmas when the dentist opened from
the holidays, I squirted my by then hourly dose of Orajel on the tooth, popped
my six ibuprofens (this sucker really hurt!) and made myself an emergency
appointment to see the dentist. She didn't take long to inform me that it was
bad, abscessed, and that I was going to need a root canal. I was pretty naive to
the process, and knew that if something wasn't done soon, I was going to need to
rip that tooth out of my head with an old rusty pair of pliers or chip it out
with a sharp rock, so I sidled up into the chair with a false dose of optimism.
Root canals? People had them all the time, right? How bad could it be? Besides,
this toothache was off the charts on the pain o meter, and I was ready for
anything. Or so I thought.
Five shots of
novacaine later ("can you feel this?") I felt I was sufficiently numb
enough to let the dentist begin the canal. Ready, that is, until she began.
Immediately I felt it was my duty to notify her that she must be trying to pull
my brain out through the cavity opening, so severe was the pain. Talking me
through it, she tugged and pulled and probed and picked until finally,
blessedly, (after what seemed like hours of ice-pick torture to the skull) it
was finished. We set an appointment for the follow up crown and I thought I was
home free. After all, I'd survived a crown before and although it had not ranked
up there in my "golden moments" category of life; it had not been
anything like the root canal nightmare.
When I returned
for the subsequent appointment, I was optimistic that the worst was behind me. I
sat down in the chair and jokingly commented thank goodness this is the last
appointment for a longggggg time. The dentist looked in my mouth, poked at the
tooth, sighed, mumbled and then took an x-ray. Uh- oh. Upon viewing "the
films" as she called them, she then informed me that the tooth had broken
more and that I was going to have to A. get a peg put in my canal to attach the
crown (okay, how bad could THAT be?) and B. have minor gum surgery to avoid
subsequent infections (gulp!) and then finally, C. get the crown.
"What about
one of those screw in teeth?" I heard myself (????) ask. I couldn't imagine
all that patching work on my poor old tired tooth. Thirty-nine years of
obsessive gumball chewing had probably worn the sucker straight out.
"Wouldn't it be better to just chuck the whole thing and get me one of
those screw in models?" (Never mind the fact that there was no way in life
we could afford the space age tooth nor would I want to sit still for the
experience which would have to begin with the pulling of my tooth).
"Those are
really great." My dentist enthused. "Are you seriously
interested?"
"Interested."
I replied (mentally apologizing to my aunt for all the grief I had given her
about her space age tooth replacement), "but unable to follow through.
I have this crazy idea that we should probably spend our money on silly stuff
like food for the kids, and the mortgage." I explained that our insurance
didn't cover screw in teeth.
We decided
together to stay the course and patch up my tooth to resemble a working
order model. The whole time we were talking I was cursing myself for not
brushing better, for hating to floss, and for all those years as a child
when I lied to my mother when she asked if I had brushed my teeth before bed.
My aunt's not so crazy, I realized that night as I ran my
tongue over my partially fixed bicuspid. No root canal would be necessary on a
good old plastic tooth, or whatever unnatural substance fake tooth manufacturers
used, and if I could afford it, I realized that I'd like a whole head of those
fake chompers. I told myself as I steeled for the first shot of novacaine that
as soon as we made it big time (we're always planning, never realizing, that
day), I'd get rid of this flimsy excuse of a tooth and buy me one of those screw
in teeth, just like my aunt's.