The Day I Had My Teeth Deep Cleaned

The truth is, if I never applied for the Peace Corps, I wouldn't be getting my teeth fixed. Pause here to congratulate myself for taking care of myself. The downside is that it's going to cost at least 5,000 dollars. The depressing thing is that equates to ten paychecks. It's revenge of the Tooth Fairy. Ten paychecks. Holy buttersquash... The silver lining--sort of--is that I can save a few hundred bucks if I decide to extract Tooth 13 rather than take the root canal route. Everything else, though, is pretty much set in stone. Either I get the deep cleaning, get the cavities filled and remove my wisdom teeth, or my mouth is fucked, and it'll be fingers-crossed that the Peace Corps lets a mouth-disaster like me get dropped into the third-world. So yes, yes, yes, it's all good and great and wonderful that I'm fixing my teeth. And the other good thing is that Delta Dental cuts the cost down a lot, and paired with a Care Credit Card, the cost is not entirely unmanageable. And if I want to be a healthy Peace Corps applicant, then I need to follow through.

Kids, remember to floss. 

And please, visit your dentist regularly.

The office has a sign outside the door that says DENTAL CARE. Inside, the ladies behind the front desk shuffle around on rolling chairs and one of them takes my information and asks me to sit. I get through five sentences of "Neverwhere" before I'm called into the back. There's an Asian family in the space next to mine with some kid getting his teeth drilled, always a discomforting sight, and the family keeps reminding the kid to keep his mouth open. I take a seat on my recliner and wait while the assistant, Carmen, gets situated and she seems a little flustered because she's obviously still new and I wait patiently for her to figure out the stand-up x-ray machine, which eventually spins around my head and captures a panoramic image of my teeth. She asks me a little bit about the Peace Corps. I'm oddly calm, expecting to get some cavities taken care of after all this introductory stuff is done, just sort of trying not to think about it. She takes photographs of my teeth, has me hold a piece of plastic between my lips and stuff a mirror into my mouth. Then Carmen spends ten minutes cropping the photos before swinging another breed of the x-ray machine over my chair and sticking some digital mouth-piece between my teeth that allows her to upload the images directly onto the laptop. Neato. None of these photos are very flattering. I can only hope I don't have the worst teeth they've seen today. 

Enter Dr. Brian Steele. He's young, balding, friendly and with a stoner's droll, he asks me about my dental history and what brought me into the dentist today. Peace Corps, yada yada yada. I show him the paperwork I got from Dr. Daby. He checks it over. Then he starts poking around in my mouth with his pick and mirror, listing off code-words to Carmen who quickly takes notes. "You're catching on quick," he says to her, finishing up his examination. I take a breath and stretch my jaw. Then he pokes the tender spots on my gums, making me flinch and bleed like a virgin. Gross, I know. 

It's at that point Steele puts aside his tools and takes out the colorful booklets about Proper Dental Care, showing me images of a healthy mouth in comparison to an unhealthy mouth, which is like looking at a beautiful car and then the crumpled wreckage of that car after a head-on collision. He explains how cavities are created, what happens when they're left unchecked, and shows me on my x-rays which teeth are healthy and which ones are showing decay. Tooth 13 is in the worst shape. He recommends a root canal. Next, we discuss gum disease. I'm already at Stage 2 Periodontitis, which is past gingivitis, but before dentures. Not the news I wanted, obviously, but I keep reminding myself that it could've been worse. Steele explains how the gums pull away from the teeth when tartar builds up below the gum-line, and how this actually erodes the bone that holds the teeth in place. He recommends a Deep Cleaning, and immediately.

I spend the next half hour with the girl from the front desk who prints out my Treatment Plan and explains what the dentist has recommended. It's 4,000 for everything to do with my main teeth and another 1,300 to get my wisdom teeth removed. She signs me up for Care Credit to help put some of this into a monthly bill, then we agree to take care of the first chunk of the Treatment Plan, the Deep Clean, which alone costs 760 dollars. By putting this chunk of the bill on the Care Credit plan, it'll be about 65 bucks a month, for 12 months. The rest of the stuff I'll have to figure out how to pay for another way.

I'm looking at you, financial aid...

Cue heavy sigh.

So four hours later I go back to the DENTAL CARE office for my Deep Clean. Hooray! Dr. Lee loaded me up with numbing gel and Novacaine, then went to work with his cleaning tool, which I never actually saw but I imagined it looked like a spinning needle. This was after he prodded my gums and listed off a series of numbers to the assistant, as in: 4, 3, 3... 5, 3, 3... 3, 3, 3... and then he said 3's are good and anything higher means the bone has started to erode. Fantastic. So "deep clean" means they try to remove all the plaque-shit that's been building up beneath the gum line on the roots of my teeth, not only from a lack of flossing, but from a lack of consistent cleanings. It doesn't really hurt. That's a lie, I feel bursts of quick pain in places where the numbing isn't strong and the sound alone is enough to get my heart racing. There are sensitive points where my whole body flinches like its been struck by lightning. I'm clenching my hands over my lap and rubbing my thumbs together, using the "think about Jenny" trick and trying anything to convince my mind that having a sharp instrument digging into the flesh around my teeth is a good thing. There is blood. An embarrassing amount of blood. It takes a little over an hour for him to finish and he injects me with antibiotics, gives me a special mouth-rinse, a new toothbrush and a three-month check-up appointment. Half my mouth is totally numb and I'm woozy from the ordeal. I taste chemicals as I hurry home, hoping I won't see anyone I know because I feel like I look like unmasked Tom Cruise from Vanilla Sky.

And so begins The Great Dental Recovery.

- Left to Fry