Maybe that title is misleading. I’m not actually losing any teeth this time. But still…

Did you have braces in the 1990s?

When I was in grade school, my dentist somehow decided that my baby teeth were not falling out fast enough, so he thought it best to yank them out a few at a time. That was a total of NINE teeth taken from me in a painful fashion just because my permanent teeth were a little bit slow. And said yankings didn’t speed them up anyway.

In junior high I was sent to an orthodontist. She told me my jaw was too small and not only would I need braces for my overbite, I needed some more teeth pulled to prevent crowding and further bite problems. So adios, FOUR permanent teeth. I have no fangs. Have you ever had a perfectly healthy tooth with a strong root removed in a violent fashion? Or four? I ended up taking the filter off the face mask and breathing pure nitrous oxide for that one – the novocaine didn’t cut it.

So we’re up to thirteen teeth pulled by eighth grade, followed by four years of braces cranked tighter every month in an effort to close the gaps from which my fangs were mercilessly yanked. Clever of my orthodontist, I suppose, to keep my business by MAKING gaps to close. When I got my braces off my senior year in high school, my dentist decided that it was time to cut out my wisdom teeth – again with the “crowding” excuse. They hadn’t even broken the gum yet, which meant he had to cut for all four of them. Two of them ended up being impacted and one was broken (not by the dentist, apparently it was growing in that way). OUCH. Motherfriggin’ OUCH.

So ever since I got  off my parents’ insurance and started managing my own stuff, I have avoided the dentist. I brush. I floss sometimes. But this winter, five years since my last professional cleaning, I developed a toothache that freaked me out enough to go. This is when I discovered that the roots of my molars are in my sinuses. That wasn’t great news, but I was told that my teeth looked okay. We’ll have to do a full checkup and cleaning to check everything thoroughly, they said. I dutifully scheduled it for February 4th.

Back to the braces question…

Did you have those metal bands that wrapped all the way around your molars?

We have a decalcification epidemic on our hands! Not only did I have to sit through about half an hour of scrapy, stabby things poking me in the mouth yesterday, I found out that people who had braces with those molar bands are experiencing a lot of enamel breakdown in those teeth. In my case, it was so much that I could have brushed and flossed every day and this gaping canyon of a cavity would probably still have developed sooner or later, simply because my tooth structure was so weakened. So I have that one that now needs a cap, another less-scary one on the same tooth on the other side, and an older, very broken filling on the top that must be repaired.

So February 12th = lots of novocaine, nitrous oxide, and four hundred bucks.

I plan on eating many, many cupcakes between now and then because really? As long as he’s working on it, I may as well give him all the cavities at once and blame it on the braces.