I'm a 46 Year Old Man With Dentures. This is My Story
In hindsight it’s ironic that in second grade I portrayed the role of Timmy Tooth and evangelized on behalf of good dental care in a school play.
I was fortunate as a child in that I didn’t get cavities and didn’t need braces but I frittered away that luck by not brushing my teeth or flossing and ingesting massive quantities of sugar in seemingly every form.
My stepmother quixotically tried to limit my intake of sugar but after my folks got divorced it was all over. I could run wild and be as unhealthy and gluttonous as my hungry little heart pleased.
I lived on soda pop, candy and sugary cereals. I was a junk food junkie, a caffeine fiend. As I got older I began to pay the price for my sordid transgressions against the Great God of Teeth and Dental Hygiene in the form of cavities and root canals and toothaches and agonizing pain and discomfort.
Like many poor people, I avoided the dentist because of the tremendous cost but also because I was terrified of what the dentist might say.
My feelings about my teeth have always been dominated by guilt, fear and shame. I felt guilty for not taking care of my teeth. I feared the consequences of my misbehavior and the pain that would undoubtedly come at some point in the hopefully distant future. And I’ve never stopped feeling ashamed of the way I fucked up my teeth.
As an adult I’ve only visited the dentist when it was an absolute emergency, when the only other option was excruciating, unbearable, blinding pain.
For years my dentist was my wife’s very nice, very professional cousin. He was and is a great dentist but I felt an additional element of shame because I was now embarrassing myself in front of family.
My teeth just got worse and worse and worse. They began to fall out of their own accord, which suited me just fine because it was a painless way to lose teeth and how many of your teeth do you really need anyway, maybe 40 percent? Unless you’re the Queen of England or Elon Musk, you don’t need more than 75 percent of your choppers.
A few weeks back I had a long-overdue dental crisis. Within a matter of days two of my front teeth fell out. As you might imagine, I felt ridiculous and sad, like a human Jack-O-Lantern with a haunted graveyard of a mouth.
I didn’t smile because I was embarrassed of my teeth but also because when you’re broke and overwhelmed and are paying a steep price for decades of dental crimes you don’t have much of a reason to smile.
Something had to be done. So I got a consultation at a dentist who makes dentures and dental implants and he gave me some predictably bad news.
My mouth was a horror show. A lot of the teeth were gone or just barely hanging on and what few teeth I had left had cavities.
He suggested that I spend a little over five thousand dollars having every tooth in my mouth removed so that I could be fitted with dentures.
Dentures at forty-six? I had a hard time wrapping my mind around that. The price made it much, much worse. I’m already drowning in debt. The last thing I wanted to do was add at least five thousand dollars to that amount.
Lastly, I was none too enthused about having EVERY TOOTH IN MY MOUTH BE VIOLENTLY REMOVED.
My in-laws tried to assure me that it wouldn’t be that big of a deal, and that I would heal right up swiftly but I didn’t believe that. I knew that I was in for a world of pain!
I was right!
My surgery was supposed to take an hour and a half to two hours. It ended up taking over four. My remaining teeth were gnarled and jagged and broken and had to be yanked out of my mouth with great force.
By the end I was in excruciating pain and had a mouth full of blood and sutures and stitches and also no teeth. The mouth is an incredibly delicate, fragile, sensitive ecosystem. So after all my teeth were removed in an involved, painful and time and labor-intensive way, a pair of dentures were slipped into a mouth that had just minutes before been a sight of incredible devastation.
It most assuredly was a big deal. Everything about it was traumatic and surreal and discombobulating. Particularly the bill! No, seriously, the bill was enormous and I’ll probably never get out of debt.
I was grateful that my teeth were no longer being removed but the pain and discomfort I felt was borderline unbearable and the dentists weren’t too keen on giving me painkillers for my enormous pain.
I simply cannot get used to these new teeth. They’re too big and white and perfect and fake. I am simply not a man who looks like he should have a big old set of blinding white Gary Busey/James Coburn teeth.
It’s just not who I am. It feels like I’m cheating and in a sense I am because I’m using teeth science sold me rather than the pearly whites the good lord gave me along with a truly staggering amount of mental illness.
I feel like I am an AARP android. Also, I feel old as fuck. Also, I no longer know how to do things like breathe, eat or talk because they all prominently involve teeth and knowing how to use teeth properly and I’m only at the very beginning of what looks to be a very long, challenging road.
Then there is the stark existential terror, that gnawing sense that I will wake up in the middle of the night in a state of total panic and start screaming about my missing teeth and the plastic imposters in my mouth.
It’s been an expensive, humbling, traumatic, painful and scary process and there’s a big part of me that thinks that I’ll never get used to this new normal.
Instead of being ashamed to show my jagged, disgusting teeth I’m now ashamed to talk because I have a Sylvester the Cat-like lisp and drool constantly, like a toddler.
I can’t eat food either. I hopefully will be able to at some point but right now it’s just too much work and hassle for too little reward. So it’s soup and ice cream and jell-o for me for the indefinite future.
There are upsides to having dentures, of course. But I’m having a hard time seeing them now because I’m so frustrated and overwhelmed.
I’m lucky that I have a wonderful wife to help take care of me during this difficult time or I don’t know what I’d do. And I have this website and my work to distract me from my pain, although as you might imagine, it’s been tough to work through all this pain and discomfort and I am taking next week off for a mental health break.
I wish that I had practiced proper dental hygiene so I am IMPLORING YOU, dear reader, to take good care of your teeth.
I’m used as a cautionary warning of the dangers of poor dental hygiene within my immediate family so hopefully you can learn from my experiences as well.
Brush your damn teeth! Don’t let what happened to me happen to you.
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