Your Oral Surgeon Loves You

A 43-year-old finally meets the tooth fairy

The week before I turned forty-three, one of my lower front teeth crumbled to pieces. The tooth, I learned, was a goner. “Nope,” said my endodontist, “nothing vital here at all.” Then my dentist presented me with options, which ranged from depressing to medieval.

I leaned toward medieval. For people like me—under sixty, non-smoker, excellent health—an implant seemed like the best option for long-term dental happiness. With a ninety-five percent success rate, what was not to like? It would be expensive, yes. Also, very painful. And it was a nine-month process. But on the plus side, I’d have the implant for 20 years, and my jawbone would stay healthy. I might even be able to eat corn on the cob. I decided to be brave, suck up the expense, and count my blessings. After all, a tooth was not a breast, not a pancreas, not an eye.

“Years from now when I have an actual illness,” I said to my husband, “I’ll look back fondly on this and say, ‘Remember that terrible tooth problem? Those were the days.’”

Dental implant surgery involves cutting the gum to expose the jawbone, drilling a hole in the bone, shoving a screw-like implant into the jaw, and sewing it all up. My oral surgeon was a middle-aged Jamaican with a penchant for soccer and corny jokes. At the time, Leo Messi was his player. As he induced my twilight sleep, he asked me if I had any good jokes.

“Man walks into a bar,” I slurred. “Ouch.”

“Good one, Ms. Grillo,” he said, sounding very Jamaican.

I started to fade.

“Just remember, Ms. Grillo, your oral surgeon loves you,” he said. “Your dental assistant Ebony loves you. Your dental assistant Tiffany loves you, too.”

When I woke up, he gave me good news: the jawbone and gum were healthy, and the procedure had gone well. It would take four months for the implant to ossify, he said, and when he showed me the shiny metal screw that jutted up from my gum where my broken tooth used to be, I asked him how I was supposed to live with that.

“Ms. Grillo,” he said calmly, “you can acknowledge that you are attractive with or without the screw. No one on a galloping horse would notice it.”

Then I went home and threw up the blood I’d swallowed.

A month later, the implant failed, a discovery he made during a routine checkup. “I have to get that out of your jaw,” he said. “Can you stay?”

Somehow, my anxiety trumped the Novacaine, despite the fact that Ebony and Tiffany kept re-injecting me with it. I felt way too much of what my surgeon did that day. I felt him scraping the soft tissue from the hole in my jawbone, packing it with cadaverous bone, and sewing my gum together. When the procedure was over I sobbed in the chair. He looked pretty shaken up, too.

“Maybe you are more sorry about this than I am,” he said, “but I doubt it.”

I called my husband in the vestibule, too sad to care that I was blubbering in front of complete strangers. Then a tall man in a barn coat folded up his phone, held open the door, and said, “Here you go, miss.” He folded up his phone for me. He could have been anyone—a dead-beat dad or a climate change denier or a guy who doesn’t pick up after his dog—but just then all that mattered to me was his kindness.

Over the next few weeks, I reckoned with the fact that I had snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, and three months later my surgeon and I tried again.

As he put me to sleep, he said, “Ms. Grillo, I don’t think I need to remind you, but I will say it anyway. Your oral surgeon loves you, Tiffany loves you, and Ebony loves you.”

We saw a lot of each other after that, fifteen visits in all. The implant seemed to be going well; or, rather, it didn’t seem to be going wrong. For four months we proceeded with caution, watching for infection, taking x-rays. We got to know each other a bit. He and his wife were raising five children, most of them grown. In the summer, he went to his hometown in Jamaica and mentored high school students. We discussed his jerk chicken recipe.

When I marveled to him about Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s 30-foot bicycle-kick goal, he said, “But Ms. Grillo, they all do bicycle kicks now.”

During those months of waiting, something surprising happened—I got a reputation for being cheerful.

“Ms. Grillo,” said my surgeon, “You always come in here with a smile for us.”

Maybe all this vulnerability was making me a nicer person.

Gradually, he progressed from cautious optimism to genuine optimism. And then one day he said, “I don’t like what I see.” Inexplicably, in the eleventh hour, the implant had failed. I’ll never forget the sad look in his eyes when he broke the bad news. Oh, that look.

Once again, I cried, and when I could stop crying long enough, we hugged. On the way home, I screamed at the universe, a lot, and then I forced myself to admit that of all the things a human could lose, a front tooth wasn’t so bad. And then I decided to give up on having pretty front teeth.

In the end, it took me almost a full year to fail. At first, I failed quickly but I drew out the process with a second attempt. Perseverance and hope were how I forestalled the thing that wasn’t meant to be. Maybe this is how we fail all the things that are important to us—slowly, with perseverance and hope. I’m pretty sure it’s how we succeed, when success is possible.

A friend with his own dental woes quoted this line to me: “I’m being pulled to the grave, tooth by tooth.” For my forty-fourth birthday, I got my first denture. It’s uncomfortable and makes me feel old. Less medieval, more depressing.

Corn on the cob—that won’t ever happen for me again. Or biting into an apple. But I’ve had forty summers of corn on the cob. I’ve bitten plenty of apples. Did I bite enough apples? There’s no way to answer that question. Middle age is such a mixed bag. [Sigh.] It has it benefits, as any middle-aged woman who watches Girls can tell you. But it also has its cons. Little by little we accumulate losses, large and small, some of them permanent.

The anecdote to the loss, maybe, is to cry in front of strangers. Or bawl in your dentist’s chair. Unless I die suddenly in my sleep, there will be more sad-eyed doctors with bad news in my future. Will they tell me they love me? We could chat about our families and trade dumb jokes. If, on some days, I have to leave my doctor’s office in tears, I could at least be the lady who came in with a smile.

Maybe this year of the implant has been a dry run. Now I know what to look for: the stranger who sees me crying, folds up his phone and says, “Here you go, miss.”