me and my front tooth
Last week, after spending several weeks with a loose crown, I sat in the dentist chair of a new dentist, looking up in her face as she explained what she would do.
"I can drill into the back of the crown and investigate the abutment and see what came loose - "
I interrupt her - as this is not my first rodeo. And this is my favorite fake tooth - the front one.
I reach into my mouth and pull out my tooth and hand it to her.
"Well that's fun," she says.
"Yeah, I was waiting until I got here to pull it out," I say.
I spend the next hour in the chair as she fashioned a way to get the crown back in, and ordered a new crown. Her comment of "use toothpaste to hold it in" as I left made me wonder.
Later that evening, my tooth slid out as I was brushing Finn and it was a mad dash to see who would get the tooth first!
This tooth and I have been through a lot. I lost it first in the second grade, when a swinging fence gate hit me in the face. This was actually on a playground, when swinging fence gates seemed a good idea for playground equipment.
"Huh," my dad said as he squinted down to take a look at my open mouth. "Yeah, I think we need to go to the dentist." My front tooth was now a diagonal sharp shard, with nerves exposed. Miraculously, I didn't feel anything.
"She should be in a lot of pain," the dentist told my dad. And then he fashioned a crown for me that looked like a lumpy kernel of yellow corn. This was in the 70s in North Carolina, not glamorous Hollywood. You get what you get.
That tooth served me well for several years, it was a battle-ax as far as front teeth go. When I got braces in the 7th grade, this tooth held on.
A move to Austin my freshman year brought the removal of my braces. Another dentist staring down at me in the dentist chair, "We can do better than that," he said of my front tooth. This time I was given a porcelain crown to match the rest of my yet-to-be coffee-stained teeth. A real stunner and confidence booster.
I ate apples blissfully and treated it like a normal tooth. Then came a winter night in my sophomore year of college that I bit into a bagel, and the tooth broke free of it's hold and I could flip it back and forth with my tongue. Sometimes if I talked too passionately, it flew out of my mouth. A great party trick.
Another trip to the dentist. "I am going to put a titanium center in the porcelain - this crown isn't going anywhere," he told me. This tooth looked pretty good but it did have a metal cast to it's color. I felt confident that this was the end and went back to chomping on carrots and eating jolly ranchers.
Fast forward to 2010. I was going through a major depression, one that lasted a bit. One day on a trip away from home I noticed a bubble had formed in the gum above this tooth. So I ignored it. For as long as possible. Because that is what you do when you are depressed. Maybe it will resolve itself, I told myself.
If you are wondering how much longer this story can be, it only gets more dramatic from here.
A very well-schooled periodontist examined my crown. "You have an infection, plus the bone holding your crown into your mouth no longer exists. So we need to remove the tooth, clean out the infection, grow new bone (with some sort of bovine marrow I suspected), and then we can attach a new implant with a crown."
After the surgery, I wore a flipper for 6 months while the bone grew. If you don't know what a flipper is, it is what child pageant stars wear when they loose their front teeth and still need a pretty smile. Basically a tooth on a retainer.
Also fun at parties.
At this point, this tooth and its subsequent crowns have cost about 25k for that playground mishap. Let this be a lesson to all playground planners. Or those who swing on gates.
The periodontist and dentist who worked on my tooth made a beautiful stellar crown. It matched perfectly, and every dentist and dental assistant commented on how great it was. Really the pride of my face. For almost a decade.
When this crown came loose last month, I calculated in my head how long I could keep it in my mouth. Past Ben's graduation in May? It was late March. I decided to go ahead and risk it, which is what ended me up on my couch this past week, wondering if I needed to just wear a covid mask for a month or really - what did it matter that I didn't have a front tooth? Would it embarrass Ben at graduation? His senior recital?
Maybe if I wore my Tiffany cocktail ring and carried a designer bag people would not judge me for my lack of a front tooth. I would just tell them up in Chicago, this is how we roll in Texas. You lose a tooth, no problem; just get back on your horse.
I spoke to the dentist from my couch as a tear trickled down my cheek. "If there is nothing you can do until the new crown comes in, I will just wear a mask."
Oh no. This dentist, unknown to me, is known for her dental McGuyver skills. How did I get so very lucky? So the next day I was back in her chair, as she made an impression of my tooth, then a crown, then something to attach the crown to and jammed it all up tight in my mouth. (Not the medical terminology.) She handed me back my Aunt Mildred's pill case that had carried my crown to her office, and I thanked her profusely.
Come May 9th, I will get yet another crown. Like King Charles, I also will have a sort of May coronation. Long live this next crown and the dentist who created her. May we live well together.