The Tooth Hurts

Welp. It’s finally happened. My problem tooth has gone nuclear. Or, it’s threatening to. Maybe. All I know right now is that my tongue keeps worming at this little pocket of ouch in my gums, localized right around one tooth. You know, that ticking-time-bomb tooth every American has to keep the fear of god in them.

As for what this ouch pocket means — or what sort of unspeakable tooth goop it contains — there is only one way to find out. I have to go to a dentist.

And aren’t I lucky to be in an up-and-coming young family town like Winter Garden, where there’s no shortage of tooth tuggers eager to tickle my ivories for a yet-to-be-specified-but-definitely-fair price? That is to say, there are some pretty swank dental practices around here. A few of them have graced the pages of this publication at some point. A couple even have payment plans for us insurance-less heathens.

And yet, I cannot choose them. I can’t choose a single one of these dentists, actually. They all have the same fundamental, insurmountable flaw: They’re dentists. And I am utterly, knee-tremblingly terrified of dentists.

I’ve had problematic chompers and a nasty penchant for sweets all my life, so I’ve endured a filling or twelve in my day. But the filling that led to a phobia was a relatively fresh one, just about five years ago. Crazy how it only takes one dentist fumbling the novocaine needle directly into your nerves, and suddenly you’ve got a new genre of nightmare where your teeth crumble out of your gums like baby powder. 

Since then, I’ve done everything I could to ensure that terrible filling would be my last. It turned out to be pretty easy. All I had to do was get serious about my dental hygiene and also never set foot in a dentist’s office ever again.

So yeah, I haven’t gone for a cleaning in, hmm, a while. But I take care of my teeth in all the other ways. I brush (usually) and floss (sometimes) and wear my retainers at night like a good little tooth-tender. So far, all my pearly whites have remained at least white-adjacent, and my breath doesn’t melt paint, so I feel like I’ve done a pretty good job. Aside from the problem tooth I’ve spent the last four years pretending doesn’t exist. That one doesn’t count.

So here I am, using my humor column as a substitute for therapy again, trying to convince myself that letting the mean teeth man use his mean teeth tools on me is better than dying of infected tooth goop like a medieval peasant.

There’s also the possibility that there might be no goop at all, that it’s just some minor swelling. Maybe I’m freaking out over nothing and I can continue to live my best dentist-free life?

Yeah, I didn’t think so either. Nothing left to do about it not but bite the bullet.