Last night I sat in a dentist chair and had my first ever adult tooth pulled from my head.
It didn't hurt so much as be massively uncomfortable. It felt like the dentist was pulling my skull out through my mouth and though the nerves were blessedly and beautifully silenced, the jarring was rudely shocking.
The whole time the writerly part of my mind was sitting there with an open notebook and a pencil and making notes.
Hmm, isn't this odd. Would I say it hurts? No, not quite. It's different. More ... really grindingly uncomfortanle. I mean, it feels like he's using a pair of pliers! Oh my giddy aunt, here it comes. I can tell it's coming out because I can hear a cracking sound in my head! Well, that and also the fact that the dentist is informing me it's coming out, like he's a midwife and I'm giving birth to a really ugly baby with decay in the middle of its face. What does it feel like? Well, I guess it feels like the dentist is pulling my skull out through my mouth!
This is what my tooth looks like if it's a line drawing and if it's brushing its own teeth. Which is a bit silly when you think about it, isn't it? If this tooth has to brush its own teeth then do those teeth have their own teeth, then? Where does it all end? No, I have a philosophical objection to this stupid pic. Advertising dentistry with a tooth brushing its own kind is as bizarre as a picture on the outside of the packet of chicken breasts of a happy gambolling chicken. Pic: by Freepik CC with attribution.
What do you mean did I look at my tooth when it came out? Of course I looked at it. I look at everything and I ask questions as I go. I look at my own poo. I can never stop asking questions about everything. So not only did I look at it but I also asked to take it home. I'm not going through all that without being able to get a real good look at it.
I took it home and I poked at its spongy decayed hole before it hardened, as it is now, and wondered at the pain it had caused. The dentist had showed me how close the nerve had been to the hole, making drinking water be like living inside a giant shitty gong. I womdered at how that nerve's jangling had travelled all the way to my ear and referred itself all the way down to my jaw. And now it's gone. All gone.
I stared at that deep spike, how far it went up into my gum and how it has held that tooth in place since the 1970s.
I know we're not meant to look too long and hard at these ugly things, at the evidence of our bodily decaying. We're certainly not meant to display photos of them to other people. That's not polite. It's kinda negative. Well, stuff all of that stupid civilisational politeness. I didn't soak up Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek for nothing. I rode with her through those twin heights and depths of being in love with the natural world, of feeling sometimes betrayed by it, of its exquisite beauty and its plain turn-away horror. I will never stop riding that twin-tracked railway which makes life feel so mysterious and so bizarre, so in need of forgiving for its pain and its exploding frogs, and so forgivable when it turns its bright face towards us and calls us blessed.
