It's Always Something

Yesterday afternoon I was enjoying a snack of cashews and M&Ms when -- CRRAACCKK -- something felt distinctly not right in the left upper quadrant of my mouth. Things hurt. Things were moving that normally stay still. Things hurt when things moved.

I thought I had dislodged a crown. And, by the way, did I mention that I'm flying out to LA this afternoon to see Emily?

An emergency call to the dentist secured a spot first thing this morning. By the time I arrive there, it's clear that this is more than just a loose crown. My evidence: the little piece of tooth I spit out after brushing my teeth, and the curious gap my tongue keeps probing,

My dentist takes a look. I am not heartened by his doleful look and his assessment: "Oh, this is bad. Very, very bad." One of my bicuspids has split in two.

The tooth is not salvageable. The options are: pull the whole tooth; pull the piece that is loosest and put in a temporary filling; try to stabilize the whole mess with glue until it can be properly dealt with at a later date -- a thoroughly unorthodox procedure. The dentist takes a long time mulling these options. It is clear he doesn't like any of them.

Complicating the decision is the fact that I take a blood thinner. Tooth extraction tends toward the bloody. He doesn't much like doing extractions himself anyway. But he's not sure how far down the loose piece has broken, and how easily it can be extracted on its own, and what kind of bleeding will result even from that.

Initially, he opts to try glue. And immediately discards the idea when he realizes that, as much as he'd like it to work, it just won't. So he numbs me up, grabs the loose piece with his pliers (probably there's a more precise dental tool name), and yanks. Once, twice, three times. It finally yields. He clamps a piece of gauze in the wound and has me bite down on it for many, many, many minutes until a clot forms. All is good. He puts in some temporary filling goop, hands me a prescription for an antibiotic and a referral to the oral surgeon to complete the extraction when I return from LA, and sends me on my way.

This is what cancer will do to your sense of perspective: it makes everything else seem small. The whole time the dentist is wringing his hands and telling me how bad it is and warning me that I'm going to lose this tooth, I'm thinking . . . "It's just a tooth. No biggie." This revised sense of perspective is actually pretty useful for stress reduction. Things that used to make me anxious just roll right off now.