A Dental Damn
OK, admit it, you just had to start reading this story with a title like that, didn’t you? Don’t worry, this story has nothing to do with the latex product sold by that similar name, though I bet a lot of you are as curious about the device as I am. I have no particular reason to be so curious, but its just one of those things that you hear about along the way in life and you genuinely put your finger to your cheek and assume a quizzical look about you. The story is, instead, about a dental subject and I did find myself saying “Damn!”, so let me set the stage for you.
When I moved out here to my hilltop, I did so in the month before COVID hit our collective consciousness. We had decided to make the move a full eight months even before that when I set a truncated lease term on my Lower Manhattan rental apartment (rented rather than bought, specifically in preparation for a planned move West). We would drive out to California just like the Beverly Hillbillies and set up shop on our hilltop that we had bought, as pre-retirement people do, eight years before, planning to do exactly this. I am nothing if not a planner, but General Dwight D. Eisenhower famously said “plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” We planned the move, but who knew COVID would intercede the month after we arrived and throw many of our plans into a proverbial cocked hat. There are many conventions of modern life that we accept as gospel and while we know they may not be founded in any real factual basis, we stick with them…just in case. A classic one would be the idea that one should not go in swimming for an hour after eating because you might get a stomach cramp and drown. Have you ever heard of anyone drowning from a stomach cramp? Have you ever seen a news flash about a boy who skirmished with death by going swimming too soon after lunch? And yet, most of our mothers told us not to go in for an hour and we just obeyed…just in case.
There was a lot to think about in the first half of 2020. The Coronavirus (not yet broadly infecting people to the point of being called by its clinical disease name of COVID-19 rather than its viral name of the Coronavirus) was rocking all of our worlds and everything on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs was taking priority. That starts with food and clothing, then security and work, love and belonging and eventually self esteem and self actualization. After one has worked one’s way thorough that you get to your dental needs. Obviously, if you have a toothache, all of that reverses immediately, but in the absence of pain drilling into your skull, dental care gets set aside. We were all raised to believe we should go to the dentist every 6 months for both a check-up and cleaning. I don’t know where that timing came from, and I have never heard any data to justify it, but like the whole swimming on a full stomach thing, I’m prepared to accept it as my practice under normal conditions.
But there is nothing normal about making one’s final retirement move and then finding out that a global pandemic is making a mess out of personal services. What could be more treacherous medically speaking than working for an hour on someone’s mouth with a respiratory virus of dangerous virility on the loose globally? Just about nothing except working on different people one after another all day long…and there is no dental dam available to protect you! And for the patients that really don’t want to be at the dentist’s office anyway, being one of the open mouths getting probed makes going to the dentist for a semi-annual check-up and cleaning seem quite a bit less critical or at least less urgent. It was that set of circumstances that caused me to avoid seeking a new dentist in my new home area for the better part of two years (that would be four normal visits, right?) Finally, as the world settled down immunologically speaking, late last year, I asked my sister Kathy for a recommendation of a local dentist. She and husband Bennett have gone for years to a dentist near them and felt comfortable recommending her and her team.
I was accepted as a client and went for my first visit in December. It was a good experience despite having two years of maintenance to do on one visit. It went smoothly with the normal cleaning and polishing plus new digital X-Rays and nothing more severe. It was simple enough that one wonders why not go another two years before returning, but I knew that would not cut it with the new team, so I agreed to a next check-up in 6 months. Generally I find that challenging a new service provider with something like a justification of the 6-month visitation cycle leads to nothing good. If I had gotten drilled and filled I might have felt differently.
So, here it is, six months later and I had an appointment to return today. I arrived early and was allowed to wait in the waiting room with a mask on. My temperature was normal, so when my allotted time came, I was called by a masked hygienist to enter the torture chamber (I have never really found dentist visits scary, but I know many people who do). She asked me how I felt since she seemed to know I had recently recovered from COVID. I didn’t recall telling the office about that, but perhaps I had. Then she asked with a pleasant tone if I had enjoyed my time on my motorcycle trip to Moab. That’s when I added two and two and came to the conclusion that my sister must have been in and mentioned something about my travels and travails. But then the hygienist said she enjoyed following my gardening projects, and I knew something else entirely was going on. That’s when she eased my quandary by telling me that she was a regular reader of my Old Lone Ranger blog. Damn! That makes it a small world.
As I sat reclining in the dentist chair getting my bib and smock arranged and rinsing with peroxide (the new drill rather than the spittle sink), we talked about everything I have been up to for the last six months. There was little I could tell Mary Lynne (we were definitely on a first name basis at that point) about my life that she didn’t already know. My kids and friends are always asking me about what compels me to be so open about my flailings in life, but I have rarely had that reality thrust so vividly into my face (actually, right into my mouth) as it was today. And here’s the thing, I wasn’t only not put off by it, I actually enjoyed it. There was a degree of interpersonal intimacy (read that as friendship rather than romance) that was quite fun. I also learned a lot about Mary Lynne and her life, probably because it only seemed fair to her to share.
At one point Mary Lynne mentioned that her husband and kids were rock climbers and they had their own climbing wall at home. That suddenly led to me wondering where I would put a climbing wall on my hillside. As it turns out, I am in the process of making a gnome climbing expedition exhibit near my fairy village, but that’s just for fun. I now have the bit in my teeth to create a climbing wall for the kids (my grandkids and nieces and nephew kids). I have just the spot and Mary Lynne has suggested that maybe her husband is prepared to help me out with this new project. Since I am unlikely to be a user of the wall, I will need someone to tell me what kind of foot and hand holds and how they should be properly placed.
Now I am anxious to figure out this new project and return in six months to tell Mary Lynne all about it. I now have a new appreciation for my teeth and gums and the dental schedule…damn!