It's time to pay attention to your teeth.

I never thought about my teeth until a couple of years ago when not one but two broke off. In my mouth! Pieces of my teeth floating around in there, tongued but not immediately recognized as what they were: pieces of my teeth!

Truly I'd almost never given my teeth a second thought. They were hard things imbedded in my gums inside my mouth that chewed up food and that I brushed every day. I took them for granted.

Big mistake.

A year or so ago, those fifty-year-old fillings I'd had implanted in my cavity-ridden teeth as a kid had started to give way, like old bridges or old buildings. One morning I discovered half of a molar on the tip of my tongue. Not long after, it happened again. The infrastructure of my mouth was starting to give way.



I hadn't been to a dentist in years, since flouride in the water eliminated cavities, so when I was put into that seat that looks meant for torture, I got kind of nervous. The dentist was a nice man and very professional, so when he said I needed crowns on those broken teeth, and I said okay.

I had no idea what I was in for.


To begin, the chair in question was tilted backwards -- way backwards -- so that I was staring up into a bright light that was focused into my mouth. Then the dentist appeared, all in white, with sharp instruments in his hand. To the side was his female assistant, handing things to him and smiling at me. It'll be okay, she seemed to say.


First came a couple of shots of some deadening agent in my gums, which hurt but not all that much. Then the waiting to see when I was numb. At some point the dentist decided it was time to go to work and got out some pneumatic device that produced that high-pitched sound we all hate and associate with a dentist's office -- and started filing my back tooth. I was upside down at the time, and the shrill whine of the drill -- inside my mouth! -- was almost more than I could take. My big fear was that the dentist's drill would suddenly go down further than the pain-killer went and I would be out of that chair in a second, in the worst pain I'd ever felt. I think that's why most of us fear dentists: they have the power, if they screw up, to inflict on us unimaginable pain.

Of course they don't mean to do that, and most of us endure time in the dental chair perfectly intact -- if a little shaken -- and go on to lead normal lives.

What happened while I was under local sedation -- still conscious but gum-numb -- is that the dentist filed two of my teeth down to nubs and then fitted new fake teeth (crowns) onto those nubs, getting the measurements just right, as the crowns have to be ordered from somewhere.

I paid the many-hundreds-of-dollars fee as I exited, looking forward, sort of, to coming back the next week to have the crowns (fake teeth) inserted onto the nubs of my filed-down teeth.

In the meantime, you know how when something goes wrong in your mouth, your tongue won't let it alone? When you're a kid and you lose that first tooth, your tongue is obsessed with probing it, right? Try having two perfectly normal teeth whittled down to points: your tongue will go crazy. After all, it's the tongue's job to monitor everything in your mouth. (If you don't think it's super-sensitive, think about deep kissing or, well, you know.) My tongue was beside itself for the next week: what did you DO in here? What the hell happened in my mouth?

I can't say the fitting on the crowns -- the fake teeth -- onto the sharpened nubs was painless. There were moments when I almost asked for more deadening. But, in the end, it went okay, and I now have what I assume are teeth that will last as long as I do.

In the meantime, however, I've had a couple of other old teeth chip off. My tongue discovered them and, of course, and won't leave them alone. I guess it's just a function of getting older.

But you know what? Unless they cause me pain, I'm going to just let them be. My time upside-down in that chair, with that inhuman whir inside my mouth (and brain), cured me of worrying about my teeth. It would take an old-fashioned tooth-ache to get me to a dentist's office again, and it would have to be pretty bad. And right now my teeth are just chipped, not hurting.

You can avoid lots of this by having your teeth checked every now and then. If you're smart, you won't wait, like me, twenty years or more between visits.

I took my teeth for granted. And see where it got me?