CarolinaJayBird

The Life and Times of My Front Teeth

Since I’ve been whining like a baby about my latest dental adventures on Facebook, I’ve had several people ask me, to put it politely, “what the #*? happened” to my face, teeth, mouth, what have you. Not to belabor it, but since I have been talking about it, I’ll write this to explain it. It is long, but since this has been an almost constant problem for me, it kind of explains why I sound like such a whiner about it, when I really do usually roll with the punches. If you just want the latest, skip to the last paragraphs.

When I was five, I fell face first on our fireplace hearth. My main and unrelenting memory of this is seeing my fat little palms in front of me covered in bright red blood. Unluckily for me, my front teeth had come in early (much like my son’s George’s have) and they were, well, wrecked. The ends of them chipped off leaving them pointy, so I looked somewhat like a vampire until after my braces came off at 13. (This explains why I am rarely smiling in childhood photos. I wasn’t unhappy, just self-conscious.)

I had the horrific experience with braces, head-gear etc. and at the end of it, my orthodontist just filed off the pointy parts, leaving me with front teeth even with the teeth on either side. Which is okay, but my dentist has since told me this is more like a “masculine” mouth. In any case, after all that, I still didn’t have the smile I wanted, but I didn’t look like a horror show either. That came later. And then again. Yay!

When I was 16 or so, the area above my front teeth became swollen and painful. After a trip to the dentist and a periodontist we learned that I had a double abscess in the roots of my front teeth. The roots had been damaged by the fireplace incident and had finally let us know just how angry they were about the whole thing. So, then I had root canals, which removes the dead roots. At that time, the periodontist advised that we get caps for the front teeth, but my mom opted not to do that for whatever reason. I remember this pretty clearly because the periodontist told me to try to convince her to allow him to cap my teeth. But it didn’t happen so …

A year later, my front teeth started turning gray. Yes, like a dead person’s teeth. (See, I promised you some horror!) Back to the periodontist we go, and he advises caps again. We don’t get caps, again. Instead my teeth are bleached from the inside out. Which is more permanent, but makes the teeth brittle. (You see where this is going … .)

So now I’m 25 and carrying a box into the house I am living in in Arlington, Virginia while I am working at my first grown-up job. I bump my teeth the tiniest bit with the box (it’s wasn’t hard, I swear!) and I get a huge chip in my front tooth. Shit.

So I go to the HMO dentist I have from my very own health insurance, who tells me I need caps. Which I already knew. So I finally get a little cash of my own and it goes directly into my mouth. Except the teeth are so fragile from the bleaching that they don’t hold the caps so well. After some horrifying incidents where my caps would just come out (on a first date, at a German beer festival, while talking to my boss - See, I promised more horror!), the dentist puts a metal pin in the most troublesome one. Finally the cap stays, but the tooth never feels, how shall I say it, stable.

I move to Charlotte and have a little more cash, and no dental insurance, but I find a great dentist, who tells me that the root of the troublesome tooth is broken and it needs to go. So I have to have a FRONT TOOTH removed. Like Mammy Yokum from Lil Abner. You can imagine my joy. So he sent me to a cosmetic dentist … 

… who pulls the tooth (actually he told me he was aghast at how easily it came loose. He gasped. I heard him. Again, horror.) But he builds me a beautiful bridge from my front tooth to the right tooth on the other side of the right tooth. Since he and his boss decide to write a paper about it, they give me a veneer on a tooth on the other side of the bridge so it would all look good. And it did look beautiful. Finally I had the smile I wanted. Except …

The boss cosmetic dentist looked at the picture they took and thought the gum on one side looked slightly uneven. Neither I nor the dentist who had done the work thought so, and my gums don’t show when I smiled so I wasn’t worried about it. But he had a handy-dandy new instrument he wanted to use and used it to do something to that gum. Well, now it was slightly uneven, but not so anyone who wasn’t inspecting me would notice. He actually offered to do the whole thing again, but I had a feeling to leave well enough alone.

So now I had beautiful, albeit supremely expensive, teeth and all was right with the world. Until I got pregnant, and the gum around the bridge got infected, as high hormonal levels can do that. But after the boys were born, the infection didn’t get better. Not with antibiotics, not with a WaterPik, not with diligent brushing, flossing and mouthwashing. My current dentist attributed the problem to the work of the handy-dandy tool that had taken that little part of my gum because a certain amount of gum is needed between tooth and bone. Ah, another problem. But at this point, fixing that would be very expensive, and I now had twins, a mortgage, cars, childcare, you name it. So basically I put off dealing with it as long as I could.

Which brings us to November 2011, when I received an e-mail from my Flexible Spending Account administrator telling me that I actually had over $3000 left in my FSA. And my dentist had been urging me to fix the gum for health reasons so I went to the periodontist who is working with my dentist to fix my front teeth once and for all, with implants and caps.

Because of the missing root and puny root of my front incisors, I didn’t have enough bone to have implants, so last week I had what was left of my left front tooth extracted and bone grafts done to give us something to put implants into. That has to heal for several months, then I will get implants. Then the implants have to heal for several months, then I will get caps. Then, I am told I will look exactly like Angelina Jolie, except without the tattoos and multitudes of children. (My own kids are better looking than hers already, in my obviously objective opinion.)

But now I look like Gollum and I don’t like it, and I am at least 6 months out from being done. But the good thing about all this is that I am now absolutely loving that law degree I hated getting, because if I didn’t have the money to do this the correct and expensive way, I’d be dealing with replacing bridges and infected gums for the rest of my life.

By the way, the above picture has nothing to do with teeth, but it is actually the ONLY one I could find that has me smiling where I show my teeth, which is very telling, dontcha think? Thanks to my friend Cate for taking it. As a bonus, it demonstrates how good-looking my boys are. Take that, Angelina.

21 December 2011 ·

Billy bob (Taken with instagram)

22 May 2011 ·

(via wordpainting)

18 May 2011 ·