Death to #2
Dentistry numbers your teeth. Number one is the top right back tooth. If you’ve got one, that’s a wisdom tooth, one of the four that erupted last through your gums. Your other top wisdom tooth is number sixteen. Below it, your bottom left wisdom tooth is number seventeen. The numbers continue around your jaw to complete the count at your bottom right wisdom tooth, number thirty-two.
I learned this stuff at the University of North Carolina Dental School, where I was a patient fifty years ago. And patience was required, because the students moved very slowly and under close observation. Amalgam fillings were free. Crowns and other restorations, gold or not, were $25 each.
Both my student dentists, Dr. John Berry of Durham and Dr. Steve Herring of Fayetteville, had long careers and are now retired. Their supervising instructor was Dr. Clifford Sturdivant, an eminence in the field who died in 2008. Great guys.
Steve took me as a passenger the first time he flew solo, in a rented Cessna out of RDU. He didn’t tell me this was his first solo until we were airborne. After practicing some figure-eights, he landed us in Chapel Hill, but not on the runway, missing it to the right by a few feet. We pushed the plane back onto the pavement manually, taxi’d to the terminal, said hi to Frank McGuire, who just happened to be standing there, got back in the plane and flew back to RDU without incident. It was fun.
All but two of my natural teeth are still in my head. Number five cracked in two when I bit down on a hard seed at a restaurant in Palo Alto, and was replaced by a fake tooth screwed into my skull: an implant. Number seventeen was saved by a root canal in Boston, but fell apart later in New York, where it was yanked, leaving an empty space in the back. If you’ve had that same wisdom tooth yanked at some point, we’re even.
Up for another root canal is number two. That one gets its nerve killed and replaced an hour from now, here in Bloomington, Indiana. I like to space this stuff out geographically as well as chronologically.
I learned a lot in dental school, including the six districts of each tooth. Mesial is the side facing incoming food. Distal is the back side. Occlusal is the top side that occludes with teeth on the opposite side of your mouth. Facial is the side facing outward. Lingual is the side facing your tongue. The restoration that cracked in number five was an MOD, meaning mesial, occlusal, and distal. The natural ivory of your teeth holds together better than amalgam, so that one was vulnerable.
The crown on number two covers all sides, and is called an MODFL (I don’t recall the correct order). Caries (decay) developed under the crown near the gum line on the distal side, and has almost reached the nerve. That’s why it hurts. After the root canal, my new dentist will either extend the crown or have the tooth extracted by a dental surgeon. I’ll get a new fake number two or live with a gap. I’ll opt for the fake. We’ll see. And feel. The total cost will likely exceed $5000. I have Medicare and a supplement, but no dental insurance.
That photo, by the way, is by far the most visited of all my shots on Flickr: 84,116, so far. I don’t know why.
Postscript: The endodontist says the rot in #2 goes all the way to bone, so the tooth has to go. That will happen after I’m back from some trips, in June. I will then live for four months with a gap between #1 and #3, so the hole heals. Then the oral surgeon (my extractor) determines if the gap, and my skull, will support an implant. If so, work on that will begin. The crown itself will be installed by the dentist who launched this journey. A circle of life.
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