A Hypochondriac Visits the Dentist

My inner voice is an unreliable narrator. It often speaks to my anxiety rather than giving me good directions at important junctures in my life.

My daughter can't hear that inner voice, so she continues talking. She looks at me with an earnest expression in her eyes. “Daddy. You should get braces.”

“Really?”

“Your teeth aren't straight.” Her own orthodontist treatment finished recently, perhaps the topic is still on her mind.

“Really? I know my teeth are a little crooked, but...”

“You could get Invisalign,” she suggests. She picks up a piece of sushi deftly with her chopsticks and shifts to a different conversation topic.

That night, I spend hours looking at my teeth in the mirror, then searching for photos from the previous few years to compare them against. In my teens, I wore braces. My teeth were perfectly straight for decades. However, over the last ten years they have slowly drifted in unlikely directions as if some sort of tectonic plate movements have taken grip on their foundations.

I find myself checking and rechecking my teeth. Each night, they appear to have moved quite a large amount from the night before. This could get really out of hand if I don't stop it. I begin calling orthodontists and asking about prices for braces and/or invisible retainers. The orthodontists I call are either booked for months, or have extortionately high charges.

By chance, on a major shopping street, I walk past an Invisalign marketing showroom. I stop in. They say I can get an exam anytime, and have prices starting from approximately $1,000. Far cheaper than anywhere else I've seen. The next day, I'm in their orthodontist's waiting room. In this fashionable neighborhood, young women fill the waiting room. Their shiny, straight white teeth beam from of their mouths. Being an age fifty plus coffee drinker, my teeth are none of those things. I think about slipping out the exit, but I don't want to disappoint my daughter.

A nurse guides me from the waiting room to the inner sanctum of the clinic. “First we're going to take some X-rays.”

I put my head where it's supposed to go, bite into the cardboard thingy, and an X-ray machine whirs around my head. The many other medical exams I've had in my life flash before my eyes as the machine peers deep into my skull. Is it going to find something? Panic begins to sets in.

A young, trendily dressed dentist is looking at my X-Ray. “I don't think we can offer you Invisalign right now.”

“Why not?”

“Your molars have problems. Big problems. We can't risk moving them.”

I'm too scared to ask him what the 'big problems' are. He's pointing at the X-ray. “That,” he says, without explaining. I see an empty spot below my molar. An abscess.

“And that's not even getting started with your top teeth.”

He gestures at my top teeth with a wave of his hand. With a flourish, as if the problem is so vast he doesn't need to point at it directly. The problem is obvious even to my untrained eye. Another gap above my top tooth, like someone has built an in-ground swimming pool and filled it with dental bacteria. Shit, this looks bad.

During the pandemic, I skipped most of my dental appointments, engaged in stress eating, and definitely didn't prioritize oral hygiene. Now looking, those were not clever decisions.

Two weeks later, I'm at an endodontist, a specialized dental surgeon, having two root canals done.

“You have quite a few problems here,” he says, looking at another panoramic X-ray of my teeth.

“Sorry, I wasn't flossing my teeth well during the pandemic.”

He nods. He's probably heard all the excuses. “Do you have any preexisting medical conditions?” he asks, with what I detect is a tone of curiosity in his voice.

“No.” I say.

“Hmm...” he says, as he studies the X-ray, preparing his plan of drilling deep into the unexplored terrain I see projected in front of us.

A half dozen Novocaine injections, two hours of listening to soft music, and a rotating circuit of drilling with various implements later, the dental procedure is finished.

“We're going to prescribe you some strong antibiotics.”

On the way out, I am handed a small mountain of antibiotics and painkillers, taken out from the drawer behind the receptionist. I pay the bill and leave.

Preexisting medical condition. The phrase spins and swirls in my mind. I might have one. Why was I given all these pills? I must have one.

To take my mind off the swirling thoughts of medical conditions, I exercise and run even more than I usually do.

On a Wednesday night with one of my running groups, as they carefully jog downhill, I take off ahead and sprint down the tallest hill in the city. I need to burn off the stress I've been feeling lately.

The next morning, I wake up with a pinch in my hip. The same spot as an injury a few years before. But this time it feels slightly different.

The running injury may have made me aware of some other problem. What could it be? Instead of Googling, I simply imagine all the other horrible things that could make my hip slightly sore after a downhill run.

A month later, I arrive at the emergency room.

My inner voice tells me I'm having a heart attack. A slow, gradual one that's been building up for the last few hours. This heart attack must have been precipitated by the root canals, that terrible problem in my hip, and the half dozen other minor bodily sensations I've felt recently.

The doctor confirms that my heart rate, whilst in the normal range, is on the high side. “Do you have chest pains?” she asks.

“No,” I say, looking at her with her stethoscope around her neck. There's a real doctor is in front of me. This is my chance to ask about the other issues I've been worried about. “But, I sometimes have a little pinch in my ribs after an Eclipse machine workout a few weeks ago...”

“So, no chest pain,” she writes down.

I go through a list of other concerns I have, but it appears she doesn't think they are important enough to write on her notepad.

“Have you been under much stress lately?” she asks, and then without waiting for my answer says, “Let's run some blood tests."

“Blood tests?” I say, my heart beating faster, ever faster, now lurching up and down in my chest.

A basket of medical tests later, she says everything appears normal and prescribes some pills. They will slow my heart and turn off my inner voice for a few days, so I can finally get some sleep. I think I need it.

***

Originally written for The Vocal + Assist Unreliable Narrator Challenge, until I read the official rules, from which I've deviated slightly with my non-fiction 900-word story of non-Halloween dread.