The tooth hurts

What I learned from chewing on one side of my mouth for the past 12 months

Last December I went to the dentist and discovered I had 5 new cavities in urgent need of filling. While that may sound like bad news, it was actually relatively good news considering I hadn’t been to the dentist in over 5 years—proper teeth maintenance being one of the many non-essentials that had fallen off the table after I became a parent and detonated all life as I knew it. Really I was lucky I only had 5 cavities.

Since they were already going to be novocaining my whole mouth, lips, tongue, nose and the lower half of my eyes, they decided to replace all my old mercury fillings while they were at it—mouth mercury being one of the wonderfully dumb things we did without thinking in the 80s, like letting kids ride around in the backs of trucks or lining cans of food with lead.

After a good 3 hours of them drilling and filling and squirting and suctioning, and me sweating and palpitating and generally fight-or-flighting, they asked me to bite down on some carbon paper so they could make sure my new fillings were lining up right. Unfortunately I was still so numbskulled I missed the paper and bit through my tongue instead.

The dentist swabbed away the blood and manually looped my battered tongue out of the way with a ribbon of gauze. After a few clumsy rounds of biting and filing, they finally got my teeth down to a level where I could chew normally—at least that was the theory—and they set me loose. I drooled all the way home.

The pain when the novocaine wore off was…formidable. But after about a day-ish it started to recede, though only on my right side. The left side still hurt like tinfoil whenever I bit down. I rolled with the ouch for a few weeks, assuming my face just needed time to acclimate, until finally I couldn’t take it anymore and went back in.

They took X-rays to confirm nothing was festering, then they filed a few more inches off my teeth and sent me on my way. The pain didn’t go away.

8 months later, I had gotten pretty used to my new life as a Half Jaw. It was easy. All I had to do was limit my chewing to the right side of my face, and lower all expectations for a pain-free life. As someone who walked around with a busted appendix for 5 days, it’s clear I have a high threshold for pain and also self delusion. I just sighed and bit the bullet…gently, and only on one side.

When the time came around for my next teeth cleaning, a different dentist was there to do the prodding. She took one look at my teeth and said, “Yeah, your bite is way too high.” She sanded things down and down and down some more until…disco. The pain was just gone. It was eerie how fast it went away. I felt like the crabby dinosaur in the Land of the Lost remake, after he got his irritable bowels scrubbed loose by Will Ferrel. I just barely managed not to plant my newly fully functional mouth on my dentist’s kisser in gratitude. I SMILIE RAINBOW MEOW PURR ICE CREAM YAYed all the way home.

So 2015, it’s been a good year. Not only did I finally figure out the tooth, but I also discovered that my brain doesn’t have to default to crazy tired and anxious. It’s beginning to make me wonder, in a hopeful new way, if maybe some of the other less-than-purrfect things I’ve been grinning and bearing (and baring) might actually be fixable, too?

I don’t want to be too greedy, but perhaps there‘s something to be done about the weird noise my knee’s been making (like the crackling from a poorly tuned radio) ever since I clogged myself? Or the 3-month rash in the corner of my nose? Or my early onset bunions? Or this elbow that aches mournfully whenever I lie on my side, stomach or back? Or how about the post-baby surprise startle-peeing? (I know what you’re thinking: The dating profile, it WRITES ITSELF! But alas, hopeful mates, I am already taken.)

Maybe 2016 is the year when I stop letting my capacity for living with discomfort define my level of happiness, and instead actively reset all my bodily and mindly expectations to something more than less than great? Here’s to hoping! And to religious semi-annual teeth cleanings.