Goodbye, Number 31

It had been a long time since I had a tooth pulled – until yesterday.  

As a kid, I had several teeth pulled in one horrifying visit. They pulled five that day, I think. Or maybe it just seemed like five.

The problem? My mouth was too small for all those teeth that my body was producing. My wisdom teeth never had a chance. Those poor buggers were removed before they even surfaced.

Having a small mouth is something that’s still a problem for me. If a waitress delivers a really thick sandwich, I have to plan my approach to eating it. Usually, this amounts to pulling some of the sandwich’s contents out with a fork and spreading them on the plate. When the sandwich is short enough to fit, in it goes. Then I finish up the stuff that’s spread on the plate…unless it’s just too much food. I have also been known to abandon a half bun in order to take a bite.

My mouth would be great in some fast-food commercial where they were trying to illustrate the size of their new magnificent, megameat-superstuffed sandwich. People watching the commercial would say, “Wow! That sandwich must be huge! She can’t even fit it in her mouth to take a bite!”

Naturally, having a small mouth makes dental visits less than pleasant.

“Open wide!”

“Open wider!”

“As big as you can!”

And that’s why I gagged three times when they tried to put in some fabulous thingamabob that was supposed to make it safer for the dentist to drill for my crown. They finally grabbed a kid’s size whatchamacallit and put that in. I tolerated it. I refrained from saying, “I told you that thing wouldn’t fit in my mouth,” even though I had pretty much predicted that when they proudly showed it to me in its shiny package a few weeks earlier.  They seemed to think it was the greatest invention. Ever.

In the past, a dental assistant sat there and expertly moved a couple of slim instruments around in my mouth while the dentist did his thing. Rinse, suction. Rinse, suction. That I could handle. When I realized the dental assistant was not near me, it occurred to me that this new product was doing her job! It monopolized precious space in my mouth so that she could go do something else. What was she doing, anyway?

You’re probably wondering how I started out getting a crown and ended up walking out without a tooth. I’m getting there. But first I need to point out a crucial fact in this story: the tooth’s location. This was the very last bottom tooth at the very back of my mouth, aka gag territory. It was tooth number 31, which is how every dentist over the years had referred to it. It’s a nice numbering system, once you know how it works. It’s helpful for decoding the conversations going on between the dentist and hygienist about this tooth or that tooth.

After drilling and drilling, the dentist stopped. He informed me that the same nasty stuff coming out from around the old, failing filling had affected the tooth’s roots as well (which apparently wasn’t noticeable on the x-rays). In the same breath, he said nobody would be able to get in there to do a root canal (Remember the tooth’s location and the size of my mouth?) and I would need an extraction. While I was happy about not having a root canal, I was not prepared to get a tooth yanked out of my head. That must be (kind of) what it feels like when a woman in labor pushes and pushes and then is told she needs a c-section.

“I can do it now or you can schedule another time,” he said. Maybe because he saw the bewildered look on my face or maybe because he needed a break from this crazy, difficult case and the woman who didn’t like his fancy plastic suction thingy, he told me to take a minute to think about it. Once I knew the area was already numb enough to handle an extraction, it was a pretty easy decision.  “Let’s do it now,” I said.

So he got the tools he needed and explained what he was going to do. I’m glad he warned me about the possible sounds of the tooth cracking. “Those sounds are normal,” he said. Umm, normal for what? A horror movie? Even with the warning, the tooth-cracking sound was unnerving. But the extraction was actually easier on me than the drilling because there was only one tool in my mouth at a time.

Before long, the tooth was out and he was offering to show it to me. I don’t know why I agreed to look at it. What was the point of that? But I looked at it. He seemed to want to show me what a nice job he had done in shaping it for the crown. But that didn’t matter. Tooth 31 was no more. Broken down and fractured, it had served its purpose for as long as it could. For years, it had cut through healthy and unhealthy foods without discrimination or judgment. Thanks, Number 31.