Let's talk about teeth

And other bodily issues

Last week was a hard one and not because my husband was out of town. A little bump along my gumline was revealed by a visit to an oral surgeon to be the result of a cracked and infected tooth that will have to be removed. Which isn’t the worst bodily problem to be facing, but still feels out-of-the-blue and a bit of a shock to the system. It was just a little bump! It was getting smaller! It didn’t even hurt!

Now there’s some pain and discomfort in my future and I’ll survive it, but it wasn’t part of my plan for the next few months. Pain and discomfort never are.

I hesitate to even write about my dental issues. Its feels shameful to have come to this—to have to have a tooth pulled. It feels like a failure even though I dutifully attend to my oral hygiene and am privileged enough to be able to afford to see a dentist twice a year. Still, what kind of person has to have a tooth removed? I know as Americans in particular, we give the state of our teeth a lot of meaning—their straightness, their whiteness, their health. I just read Under the Wide and Starry Sky by Nancy Horan, a novel based on the marriage of Robert Louis Stevenson and his American wife, Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne. One of the first things Fanny insisted on when they married was that Stevenson have all his “bad” teeth pulled and replaced with new ones. Dentures, I guess? Is there a better metaphor for British and American attitudes towards teeth?

Photo by Colourblind Kevin on Unsplash

I had convinced myself that the little bump was nothing. Or it was cancer. It all depended on what sort of mood I was in. That it could be an infection in my tooth never occurred to me. It took all of ten minutes for the oral surgeon to come to this conclusion and then proceed to schedule an extraction, but all I could do was blink in shock.

The appointment was in Columbus, Indiana, about an hour up the road from home, and I’d planned as long as I was there to go to their grocery store, because a grocery store in a bigger town almost always means finding things that are not available in our own Kroger. Good cheeses. Marmite. And we are on a constant quest to acquire our favorite tonic water (Schweppe’s, either in the small glass bottles or the 8 ounce cans, but not the 12 ounce plastic bottle because the tonic loses all its fizz). We are grocery nomads.

I was texting my husband about the sudden turn of events (he was still in Muncie) and absorbing this new information. The bump was not nothing. It was also not cancer, which should have been a relief. It was an infection and wandering through the unfamiliar grocery store, I felt suddenly contaminated. Gross. An infection. One that had been there for at least a couple months, which was when the bump appeared. Was I light-headed? Had the infection spread to my brain? Was I going to pass out there in Columbus and who would come get me? Would I die alone there (one of my biggest fears). And, for fuck’s sake, where did they keep the tonic in this store? Why in god’s name don’t grocery stores have standardized layouts?

I did find the tonic, but not the horseradish, because there is no divining where the horseradish fits into the arcane grocery organization system. Is it a condiment? A spice? Akin to pickles and olives? Who can say?

I was also going to pick up Indian food while I was in Columbus for dinner because that is also something we don’t have in our small town, but I didn’t have the stomach for it. I didn’t have the stomach for much of anything. All I could think of was infection, infection, infection. The word was a hard knot in my stomach, making me nauseous. I vacillated between denial and panic. Surely this oral surgeon didn’t know what he was talking about. My actual dentist didn’t think it had anything to do with my tooth. Plus, he’s a surgeon. Surgeon’s always want to cut things out of you.

Also, I was going to have to have something cut out of me. Not for the first time. I had my tonsils removed when I was in 2^nd grade. I remember being put under, the smell of grape bubble gum, which might be what the anesthesiologist told me the gas smelled like. I remember afterwards my throat hurting and being able to eat lots of ice cream. I remember the stuffed dog animal my parents bought me from the hospital gift shop, which I held onto for years.

Since then, I’ve had warts removed and moles and two root canals (I don’t know why my teeth are so bad, I swear I do brush them), but I’ve never been put under again.

My husband came home Friday afternoon and I put on my best performance of I’M TOTALLY OKAY AND DEALING WITH THIS. It was a shitty performance. Even I wasn’t convinced. I’ve realized this about myself. I set up very unrealistic timelines for the getting over of shit. Sometimes I generously give myself a whole two days to get over the shit. More often, it’s like 24 hours. In 24 hours, I tell myself, I should be totally past that devastating news. Tick, tock, Robyn! It’s just a fucking tooth! Keep calm and carry on and all of that.

By Saturday, I could joke about it. “We’re all walking corpses, in a constant state of decay,” I told my husband as we ate our bagels. I don’t know, it sounds sort of like a joke, doesn’t it? One of those funny but true things.

Yes, there is the fear and uncertainty about the whole process. Yes, there’s the shock. Yes, there’s the anxiety when I had convinced myself it was cancer and the fact that anxiety doesn’t actually disappear when whatever the source of the anxiety is goes away. Anxiety is like a houseguest that once you invite inside is very difficult to remove. It is a habit and it doesn’t care if there technically isn’t anything to be anxious about now. It’s still on your couch, eating all your favorite snacks and watching horrible TV shows.

But also there’s this sense that this is what life looks like from here on out. My body is an aging appliance and things are just going to keep breaking down. And there’s no new refrigerator on the way. This is what I’ve got, so it’s time to start making do. This is the shitty thing about aging. Like aging athletes who just at the moment they master the mental part of their game, they find their bodies can no longer keep up. Mentally and emotionally and spiritually, almost-50 feels pretty good. Physically, at the moment, it’s a bit of a shit show.

I’ve done some reading about navigating the aging process. There’s a lot about the mental part of it. Less about the whole walking corpse thing. That’s not surprising. We are a culture that doesn’t like to talk about bodies in anything but a very juvenile sort of way. We ogle beautiful bodies. We marvel at the physically capable bodies of athletes. We obsess about the bodies of transgender people. But stories about puking and infected teeth and migrating uterine tissue? We’re not so into that. Keep it to yourself. Too much information.

We don’t talk about those things and so when you find yourself inhabiting a walking corpse, it feels very lonely. Because we don’t tell stories about our bodily failings, it can feel like you’re the only one even though you know that, of course, you’re not. Everyone’s bodies are letting them down all the time. And everyone’s bodies are giving them incredible joy (like the taste of fromage d’affinois acquired at the Columbus Kroger or a gin and tonic with the good tonic water).

But here we are, either way, in these bodies we so rarely talk about. But we should, infected teeth and all.

This post inspired partly by the need to write through my anxiety and also by this touching and honest essay from Paul Crenshaw.

Fell on Black Days

I also loved this essay

Elizabeth Marro

shared from The New York Times about not wanting to walk with people. Sorry, walking friends. Not into it.

And that novel, Under the Wide and Starry Sky, is a lovely reflection on two creative people trying to make a life together, especially when the creativity of one of them (the man) is much more valued and acknowledged than the other (his wife, Fanny). I found it on Shepherd on one of their lists (best books about the romance of famous literary couples), which you should check out, along with my own list.