I fill out a few forms in the waiting room. General stuff, some health-related questions, a signature here and there, the date, insurance information that I leave blank. I pass it off to the receptionist along with my Peace Corps forms. "Oh, where do you want to go?" she asks. "I'm not sure," I say. "I'll probably end up in the Ukraine. A lot of English teachers go there. Or Africa." Then it's back to the waiting room with its view of the hospital construction site across the freeway, the tall cranes docile over the bare steel beams. I read a couple paragraphs of "Neverwhere" before one of the assistants calls me over to follow her down the hall. Her flowery shirt contrasts with the sterile blue walls, gray carpeting, minimal decorations. I glance into the rooms we pass, catching sight of other patients laying flat with their mouths open, hearing the vacuum-suck sound of instruments over the softly-playing Top 40 on the radio.
I get my own area at the end of the hall with a chair and an x-ray machine. For some reason I hadn't expected to be sitting in a recliner and have a quick panic, worried that they're going to be doing more to my mouth than flashing it with radiation. The quiet assistant drapes a heavy vest over my chest, then presses a button to lift my chair another foot toward the ceiling, swinging the metal arm of the x-ray gun around my head and aiming it toward my face. She has a little trouble getting the thing to stay in position. She readjusts my heavy vest and then picks up the plastic mouth-piece from the desk. "Open," she says, and I close my eyes and obey and the awkwardness begins. "Close," she says, and I do, and I fight the urge to gag and it feels like biting down on a bottle-cap. Once she's gotten the x-ray gun in place, she rushes around the corner and presses a button on the wall. Something buzzes, the machine clicks. She comes back and pulls the plastic out of my mouth with gloved hands. Saliva drips. I swallow and stretch my jaw. This is an embarrassingly intimate moment and I can't look her in the eye as she returns with another mouth-piece, asks me to open my mouth, and wiggles it into place. "Keep your tongue pressed down," she says. I try. Buzz, click. Another. Buzz, click. Buzz, click. A new plastic piece, this one attached to a yellow plastic loop (through which she aims the x-ray gun), and difficult to hold in place. She has me hold the thing with a free hand and I'm thinking it's probably not safe to have my hand so near the x-ray gun, worried I'll be sprouting a sixth finger sometime next week because of this. Oh well. It's gotta be done. She has trouble getting the mouth-piece into place without making me gag, and sometimes I bite down in a funny angle that moves the aiming-ring, and she keeps her cool and we sort of laugh about the whole thing, and she tells me, "Eight more," at some point after it feels like we've been doing this forever. The plastic digs into the soft flesh, pinches my tongue, makes my eyes water, and I try to find my happy place and ignore the discomfort. My mind goes to bed with Jenny, kissing a trail from her belly-button to her neck. This helps. I survive. The x-rays are finished and the vest is removed. "Thank you," I tell the assistant. "Sorry if I hurt you," she says. I shrug. "It's gotta be done."
Here comes the dentist, Dr. Daby, your classic white-haired elder with a friendly face and some relevant anecdote to share to make me more comfortable. Something about college friends in Canada who went to teach English in Japan. He says he's seen about 40 people with Peace Corps ambitions come through his office, and says that the Peace Corps is, in fact, quite picky about the smallest dental details. "So where do you want to be sent?" he asks, everyone's first question. "I'm pretty much open for anywhere," I tell him, wondering if maybe I should just pick a place to be passionate about so I can give people better responses. "Somewhere warm, I guess," I add. While we're waiting for the x-rays to print, he reclines me back and starts looking through my mouth. The assistant sits nearby and copies down all the codes and numbers he calls out like a Wall Street stock-trader. I hear the cash-register cha-ching each time tooth decay is discovered. "Facial on five, M.O. on twenty-one, M.O.D. on thirteen, O.L. on fourteen, D.O. on twenty..." He rattles off about thirteen or fourteen codes. None of them sound hopeful. I listen and swallow between his probings, closing my eyes against the glare of the bright lamp-light, listening to the assistant's pencil scratching notes behind me. A second assistant comes with the x-rays with their ghostly shapes and white blotches and Daby says, "I thought the bottom teeth were pretty good until I saw the x-rays," and goes back to probing, using a new tool that beeps when it detects cavities like a metal-detector combing the beach for buried treasure, and sure enough there's another one to add to the list. He raises my chair and leaves for a minute to attend to another patient.
I'm screwed. I know this. The other assistants in the room know this. I've got fourteen cavities in my mouth. I've known this, somewhat, though the exact number slipped my mind in the past when I'd been much less compelled to deal with it. But now that I've got the Peace Corps waiting for my passable dental report, I know this is something I've got to take care of. No choice about it. I have to. "Where do you want to go?" one assistant asks. "Oh, anywhere really. Wherever they need me," I reply. I wait patiently while the two assistants chat about how the first assistant's performance with the x-rays and the note-taking, talking about me as though I'm not laying right there.
Daby comes back. We talk about my teeth, mostly about Tooth 13, which is the one he recommends I get fixed first because it's in pretty bad shape. "It's pretty much just a shell," he says, noting that the opposite tooth on the top of my mouth, Tooth 4, was the one I had removed, the one that basically fell apart in my mouth. He says, "Hopefully I'll still be able to save it." Next, of course, old news, he says I have to get all my wisdom teeth extracted. All of them. He says, in the end, that I need to fix Tooth 13 (and the one next to it, which is equally decayed), get a cleaning, then start with the other remaining cavities, finishing all my dental work with the wisdom teeth extraction. After that I'll have prettier x-rays to send to the Peace Corps.
After that....
Without insurance, this will all cost 2,596 dollars.
So the receptionist recommended an insurance company that I'll look into and said their office will be on vacation next week so I've got some time to figure this all out. I took my forms and gathered my things and left the office, not surprised by the results, just re-awakened to the sad state of my teeth. I feel bad. I feel like I let myself down. All those years of poor dental hygiene, not flossing, not caring... Makes me realize how important that all was, and is, and how if I ever have kids, I'm definitely making sure they take their teeth seriously. This shit is real. My teeth are fucked up. It's good that I've got the Peace Corps to motivate me to take care of this problem now. Otherwise, who knows how bad it could've gotten. Next thing I have to do is find out more about insurance and get an appointment scheduled to rescue Tooth 13.
And if that doesn't just sound like the funnest thing to do in the world, then I don't know what is.
The good news is that I woke up today with Jenny and we listened to the Beatles and ate tasty pancakes outside in the sunshine. Then we biked to coffee at Old Soul and Erin was there, said her interview couldn't have gone better. Meredith is cutting her schedule down to two shifts next week. Lance showed us photos from the past week he spent helping tornado victims in Louisiana, shuttling food donations around the ravaged neighborhoods, doing this, it seems, almost on a whim. You gotta love Lance. He's a sweetheart. Glad to see him put his time and money toward community outreach, not just cappuccinos and granola. Jenny and I continued on our walk, sipping our iced drinks, and I walked through the Capitol for the first time with Jenny as my guide. Felt pretty awesome on the upper floors as the only one wearing a t-shirt in a crowd of business casual. After that, Jenny went off to the post office to mail in her FBI Background Check information and I hurried off to make it to my dentist appointment on time.
Tonight, another bonfire in the backyard, which is always fun.
- Left to Fry
