It was a typical
weekday morning. I was eating breakfast at the kitchen table, gluten free
waffles and meatless sausage patties, the result of recently shopping at Trader Joe's. As I bit down on a tiny, hard substance I
recall thinking, “Hmm… what would be hard in a waffle and a non-meat sausage
patty?
Immediately
after this thought, one of my bottom front teeth felt strangely rough. I tried
scraping off what I believed to be an offending piece of food stuck on the
tooth, until it occurred to me that it wasn’t something stuck. It was something
missing – the top of my tooth.
Here’s the
thing. The minute you realize something in your mouth has changed, you start
talking differently. I don’t know if you’d call it a lisp or a slur, but I was
definitely compensating for my unhappy incisor. A detour to the dentist before
work was obviously in order.
Now, ask
yourself, is a dentist’s office a place where you would expect to find a
“walk-ins welcome” sign? Absolutely not. But I did just that and I all but
begged them to fit me in that day. Despite the business of their waiting room,
they took me in for an x-ray and determined that only the top had broken off
and could be repaired at the end of the day. I can do that, I figured. It
wasn’t like I didn’t have a tooth at all – it was just the top that had broken
off.
My tongue, on
the other hand, had a different idea. It would not leave that dang tooth alone.
No matter how hard I tried to consciously steer it away, my tongue kept gravitating
toward the sharpest spot on that tooth until it had developed - to the surprise
of no one – an extremely painful sore on the bottom.
During my work
day, nobody seemed to have taken much notice of the chunk of missing tooth, my
fool tongue was causing the most grief.
I’m a big baby
at the dentist, stemming from bad childhood experiences, but this time I didn’t
cringe hearing the drill that was smoothing the jagged edges down. It only took
a few minutes for things to be packed, patched and polished so that it looked
like the rest of my teeth. I had no idea they could make this kind of paste
with a coffee stained hue.

It’s a bad
habit. There are others but this one takes the cake, or - in this case - the
tooth. At this very moment, I am willing my teeth not to clang together,
especially considering the fact that this filled-in spot is only as permanent
as I make it by not biting down on anything too hard, and by stopping my own
tooth abuse. I’m finding this to be quite the challenge. It’s fairly easy to
avoid chomping down on anything that would loosen my dentist’s glorious work,
but policing my own grinding is proving to be a challenge. However, becoming a
frequent flyer at the dentist is not an option, so awareness will be a priority.
My tongue healed
quickly and I am back to biting down, but with some caution. I can tell you
this little mishap will not deter me from eating those gluten free waffles and
meatless sausage patties.
Sometimes you just have to live dangerously.
No comments:
Post a Comment