(continued - click here for post 1)
Here I must ask your forgiveness. As it turns out, the phrase I used to explain why I did not go to the dentist for the roughly 8 years leading up to 2011 - “my teeth had begun falling out of my mouth” – was an embellishment, though not by much. A decade or so ago, around the turn of the century, spiritual awakening took hold and tooth decay surged in my mouth.
Since childhood, I have had nightmares in which I have the wrong number of teeth, or, sometimes, my teeth fall out as easily as rows of dominos falling against a table top. In these dreams, I catch my teeth in the palm of one hand and look down to see that their roots are coated in a pale sheen of blood. Occasionally, I have awoken from these dreams to find myself standing in front of the bathroom mirror, heart pounding and mouth open, examining my molars.
However, the phrase, “my teeth had begun falling out of my mouth,” is descriptive of more than an emotional and psychological state; it alludes to something deeper than a sense of anxiety and helplessness. Though no teeth were lost in this dramatic bout of awakening, the dentist’s chair became an abode, a place where I lived and faced myself, a leather-upholstered sanctuary cum sanitarium where I was forced by medical necessity - and the fact that my mouth was filled with dental damns, suction devices, and the dentist’s latex-covered fingers – into silence and from there into reflection.
As a child, my teeth were prone to decay. The culprit was as much, I suspect, a diet of sugary and refined foods as a lifestyle of over-activity and identity development based on social expectations more than an authentic sense of self. As a result, long hours at the dentist’s office on sunny summer days, the force of the drill against my small jaw, and overdoses of nitrous oxide were as much a part of my childhood as Captain Crunch cereal, cinnamon-sugar-white-bread toast and Saturday morning cartoons. This confluence of dentistry and sugar left me – and at least one other sibling - with “mouth trauma” and firm habit of avoiding the dental chair.
As an adult, in the throes of awakening, I squirmed in the dentist's chair and asked for extra injections of Novocaine to numb the pain. For several appointments in a row, shock and fear registered within the soft brown facial features of the dentist. Once, she furrowed her brow, drew a sharp breath and whispered, “Oh my god!” With her mouth formed into an O, and her black eyes darting up to the face of the dental hygienist sitting across my belly from her, she dug her dental pick deeper into the now soft portions of a tooth whose decay ran to the root. When she removed her tools from my mouth, a tear ran down my cheek. I expressed remorse for the preceding 8 years of dental self-neglect. At this, she muttered a grim promise before rushing me off to a nearby root canal specialist, “We will do everything we can to save the tooth.”
Another time, the flesh of gums around new crowns was dying due to inadequate blood circulation even when the crown was only months old. One night, I had eaten a cookie and fallen asleep with crumbs in my mouth. Within a few weeks decay had crept under the new crown necessitating a filling on the already compromised tooth and a replacement crown. In this phase of awakening and decay, it was as if my earlier nightmares of ill-tooth loss were manifesting in my waking life. I was scared.
(for more see next post....)
