My Two Front Teeth

When I was a little kid I went over the handlebars of my very first bike and face-planted into the asphalt outside my apartment complex. I came up with chips of pavement embedded in my gums and about half of both my front teeth gone. We were pretty poor but I eventually got them capped. It wasn't too bad, I just had to be careful. Then, one night, I woke up in tremendous pain. My whole face was swollen and feverish and my mom rushed me to the doctor. The teeth had abscessed and would need root canals. Over the years after lots of work (and a lot of it badly done) I ended up developing a somewhat nervous mistrust of dentists. With a mouth-full of what turned out to be teeth that were highly susceptible to decay and a childhood spent as a latchkey kid never really made to brush her teeth, I have spent countless hours under the drill. But the teeth that always bothered me most were the front two. After my caps came crowns, fitted onto metal posts. One broke out when I was in high school and was replaced with a too-white, ill-formed, awkward new one. The gums over my front teeth were forever purple, puffy, and irritated but I could never afford to get them fixed and didn't even really understand what was causing it.

Then, a few months ago, at a dentist visit related to a whole other horrible problem, I was informed that the teeth holding the crowns on had become decayed and soft. They were basically ready to jump ship and implant in a candy bar or sandwich or cheeseburger at any moment.

Finally, a couple months ago, I got some dental insurance. I needed to make an appointment but my apprehension over yet more bad dental work caused me to hesitate. Finally, about three weeks ago, I had them checked out. Yep, she said, they were in bad shape. The crowns had to go. She pulled them free with almost no effort and slapped on some lovely temporaries. Still, I walked around for three weeks worried about the permanent ones that were being created in a lab somewhere.

Yesterday, it was finally time to get the new ones--what I've been calling my "forever teeth." And I found myself standing in the hallway, staring at nothing, crying about the whole thing. I should've been excited but I was terrified. The memory of my mom holding a bottle of peroxide and a bloody wash cloth, picking pavement out of my 9-year-old gums assaulted me. I'd spent twenty years with obviously strange, uncomfortable teeth. As a teenager I trained myself to smile with my mouth closed. In later years, I stopped letting their appearance bother me but the initial pain, all the distress wrapped up in those teeth and the time spent in the dentist chair because of them, years and years of sore, puffy gums and fear that my bad teeth would break off when I didn't have insurance--it all welled up inside me and I was shaking as I walked into the dentist's office.

I was told to wait a couple minutes, that she would be right with me. I took a chair next to my husband.  His smile encouraged me. Then saw this:

 I laughed out loud, grinned and opened what's one of my favorite magazines even when it doesn't have  a Star Trek reference plastered on the cover. I showed it to Scott and we talked about the pervasiveness of Star Trek in popular culture until it was time. Not too much later, I walked out with my new teeth and I smiled all the way home (not with my mouth closed) where I watched some Star Trek and fell asleep. All in all, a pretty good day.