Wisdom Teeth

A common experience for teenagers, my wisdom teeth were coming in. Some people have enough room in their mouth to accommodate the addition, but I was not so fortunate. My bottom two wisdom teeth grew at a diagonal, angling closer and closer to my molars. The top two were clearly a bit drunk and attempted to spiral out of the side of my jaw.

I went to see a new dentist around the same time, since our childhood one had retired. This new one told me he could perform the extraction anytime I wanted, that he had even done so for his own kids.

The standard approach was to see the local oral surgeon, who my mother knew by name. Except nothing happened. I would ask, and be told for months that she would get around to it. As the pain in my mouth increased, I decided to take matters into my own hands. The new dentist was clearly in our insurance network, he had all our information. My father sang praises of his dental hygienist. I called and made the appointment from a teacher’s office at school.

When I told my mother what I had done, she made it clear that I had overstepped, but decided to let me experience the consequences of my own actions. I was sixteen or seventeen, afterall. Far past time I understood the intricacies of navigating trust with a dental provider.

The appointment wasn’t canceled. Somehow, I didn’t find it odd that my father took me, something that nearly never happened. The novocaine injections hurt, and I was told to quit complaining. Awake, alert, and in pain, I managed as the first two were removed and stitched. As he worked on the first side of my top jaw, I had to hold myself down in the chair, tears rolled down my face as I breathed through the most pain I can recall experiencing.

The fourth and final removal proved to be the worst. It had to be rolled against the socket. It was stubborn, twisted. With all the sweetness and care of a DMV employee, my dentist agreed to attempt more novacane if it would shut me up. My complaints were a problem, an unnecessary performance from a spoiled and weak child. His children hadn’t acted this way.

Before the new numbing had taken effect, we began again. I gripped the arms of the plastic-covered chair and applied every shred of experience in making myself small and hollow, knowing that the sooner I controlled my poor behavior, the sooner we could be done.

Puffy, blotchy, shaking, I stood with my father at the front desk to check out. Through the muffled haze of dissociation, I heard the receptionist tell him everyone looked like this after an extraction. My tears and pain were perfectly normal, nothing to worry about.

Into our front door I drifted, stopping in the kitchen where my mother stood looking smug and satisfied. “I knew he was bad at pain management, but you wanted to be an adult, so I hope you learned your lesson.”

I did.

I learned that my pain was of no importance or value. It was an ugly, useless thing that I needed to have removed as soon as possible. My choices were to suffer with painful teeth that didn’t fit in my mouth or allow a sadist to rip them from my face.

Other lessons were reinforced, but not new. My brother and I had agreed to watch a family friend’s dog while he was out of town. I was supposed to drive there and attend to my responsibility.

“Did you take your pain meds? You KNOW you can’t drive on those. You better not have.”

So, I lied. I drove the eight blocks with a dose of liquid Tylenol-3 which had been mis-converted when my dad asked for it to be switched to liquid incase I was swollen and struggled to swallow. I was on roughly half the amount of pain management intended, shamed for using it, and escaping to a quiet house with a sweet dog for a few hours to nap.