Will I lose my front tooth? Will I lose my front tooth to a corn chip? Will I lose my front tooth to a corn chip and swallow it accidentally? Will I ever comfortably eat beef or an apple again? Will I lose my tooth while in California or Florence or even Worcester and be instantly transformed into an Irish hag of fairy tale horror? Will I lose my front tooth tomorrow morning when I take out my mouth guard and there’s that tiny bit of suction? Will I worry so much and eat so little that I lose weight? Could I eat so little and get so attached to losing weight that I get all weird about food? And if I count cooking and food as two of the remaining pleasures in life, how would I fare without them? Maybe I’d bungi jump or go axe throwing on Friday nights or learn to play a vicious hand of bridge or throw out almost every thing I own.
* Can you tell I went to the dentist yesterday? “Ready yourself,” she said after gluing my post and crown back into my mouth, “for an implant. The crown could come loose in a year and a half. Or tomorrow.”
Good grief.
There are many stories to tell about my front tooth, beginning with the time (I was six? Eight?) when I walked into an automatically opening grocery store exit thinking it was the entrance and continuing to when I was maybe fourteen with a poorly executed inward gainer off a very springy diving board. What’s that? Sixty years. It’s been sixty years since I’ve had a live, healthy tooth there. I guess I’m lucky it hasn’t been problematic before now is another way to think about this.
PS I was weeding right before taking these pictures in case you’re wondering about the dirty fingernails.
Aaaaahhahaha!ha-ha-ha!!ahhhh-ha!haha. Ha-haha, haha!!
Haha!ha. Ha!
Omg,
That picture of you at your computer is priceless.
Dentists are wicked-hearted blood-letters and they have a very dark sense of humor. Am I wrong? My great grandfather was a dentist b4 they had a anesthesia. My grandfather was a dentist and he was happy to have chloroform. My dad recalled, as a child, watching his dad pull a tooth in the office, when the patient turned blue-black. They brought the patient back. I wonder if that poor man really ever recovered.
I inherited some of those old guy’s dentistry tools and viles of powders (good Joseph Cornell box art materials) The drill was in that box of tools I declined taking it. Bad bad vibes.
Imagine getting your tooth drilled out with a hand drill…
My dentist said I should get my teeth straightened, last year. He said “hey. You do not want to be in the old folks home and have someone else trying brush your teeth when they are all mashed together”.
Gag me! But, I’m thinking maybe I *should* do do the invisiline. So expensive.
You are brave. And hilarious! xx M
Braces at our age? What a history of dentists in the family. Eek.
Oh OW. I cracked the same tooth badly in a car thing, high school. The temp crown was too big and not a color match so I mastered the art of the Mona Lisa smile. Even after my current dentist set me up with a perfect splinted bridge and called me ‘Hollywood’ about fifteen years ago, you aren’t likely to see the teeth that cost me about a Porsche.
I know the Mona Lisa smile! This crown is about a year and a half old. The previous one shone like neon against my other aging, stained teeth. This one still isn’t a perfect match but it is soooo much better.
Oh my goodness you are hilarious .. that picture of you at your computer is priceless.
I wrote for three hours today and it kept coming back to my goddamned tooth.
I KNOW it’s not funny, but you had me chuckling, which was great after a long day…our brains work in similar ways.
Maybe instead of an axe, you could try a tomahawk? Maybe you could get this good with enough practice? haha
That clip made my morning. Glad I watched til the end. What a punch line!
Oh dear Dee….good one! Good luck retaining your tooth.
Oh thank you. It’s also an opportunity to notice how things could be so much worse, you know?
Your wry wit shines in your writing … like a mismatched tooth perhaps? … but no, that would be a comparison that goes in the wrong direction … in any case, I laughed even as I cringed
Well I’m glad this post made people laugh. Who knew?
ugh teeth and aging and losing teeth, oh the fear of losing them
how vulnerable one suddenly feels
I know all about that!
and yes it could have been worse, but still here you are and this is it
I have several friends who go through life minus several molars and they look okay, not something I would have imagined possible 5 years ago, yes a front tooth IS different
our eldest has an implant, same tooth as yours, works a treat
I will get there. Have had not so good experiences with implants