I woke up to find my lower jaw missing.
Yup. Missing.
Entirely gone.
It wasn’t the work of zombies, nor a voracious strain of Leprosy…
It was the work of satan my dentist.
A few sundays ago, The Teddy Bear and I decided to make the most of an unusually beautiful September day by having brunch al fresco. The sun was shining, birds were singing, flowers were in bloom, and a Venus flytrap was contentedly digesting a fly. We ordered a continental breakfast with a side of muffins. As I bit into one there was an almost imperceptible shift in my mouth. The next bite yielded an unholy crunch which was completely uncalled for given that the muffin had the consistency of a cloud on a cool fall morning. I quietly examined the inside of my mouth with my tongue, trying to dutifully determine the source of the crunch, which took almost all the brain power my sunday brain could muster.
Now, aside from having no editorial process in my head, and having less-than-admirable tact, I also have no control over my face whatsoever. My face is completely controlled by my ass emotions. I am handicapped with the inability to hide what I feel inside. When I see an unusually ugly person, it doesn’t matter if it’s a relative or a senior manager, my face will flinch and then transform into a grimace and then melt off my skull. I can’t control it.
In this case, as my tongue did what it did best: groping (the deep recesses of my mouth), my face froze. The Teddy Bear said if my face were a customer service rep, it had already put him on hold. Another second and elevator muzak would start wafting out my ears.
Not finding anything with my tongue, I decided to investigate this further and regurgitated the chewed-up muffin and found a piece of tooth.
You cannot make this stuff up, people. I spit out a tooth, covered in spit-muffin.
I could not have been more surprised if I had sneezed out a piano or coughed out my eye. Connected to my lower intestine.
So I went to the dentist. And apparently the cavity had gone so bad as to chip away at the enamel and all I was left with was a hollow tooth, which imploded and collapsed in on itself. Weirdly, I felt no pain whatsoever. That is, until yesterday, when I had a chocolate extreme blizzard from Dairy Queen. And all that ice-cold sugary goodness landed on the exposed nerve of the hollow tooth. And the floodgates of hell opened and you learn very quickly that drinking ice-cold water is actually a shitty idea to make the pain go away.
So I went to the dentist to have the damned thing yanked out.
Open letter to my Nazi tormentor dentist:
- Don’t say “I’m going to give you something to numb your jaw” when you’re already elbow deep in my gullet and depressing the plunger on the syringe. Warn me before you jab that fucking needle into my gum.
- Listen to me when I say I’ve survived cancer twice so my body is used to anesthesia. It takes a little longer to process the fact that I’m supposed to be numb.
- Wait for the fucking anesthesia to kick in before you start using your goddamned ice pick to push my gum back to get to the root of the hollow tooth. That fucking thing hurts, seriously.
- When a patient is shaking and hyperventilating in your chair, and the clenched eyes are water sprinklers spouting tears, STOP AND ASK YOURSELF IF YOU’RE BEING A SADISTIC BITCH.
- Don’t jab me with two ADDITIONAL doses of anesthesia because you couldn’t wait for the first one to work. Because two hours later, when all that anesthesia finally takes effect, my entire fucking jaw will magically disappear from the face of the earth. My jaw is important to me. It is also important to the Teddy Bear is he is not a big fan of uncontrolled flying spit when he is trying to engage me in conversation.
- Trust me, when you say “just relax” as you’re trying to violently wrestle a tooth from the bone of my jaw, I may actually stick my foot up your ass.
Happy Halloween, folks. Enjoy the candy this year while you can, because next year I am going to be eating every Reese’s Pieces within a hundred-mile radius.
