A Life of Bad Teeth and Lessons Learned

Mara here:

I got a tooth implant this year.

This might not sound like a big deal, but it was a five year process. Yes, five years.

Actually, it's more of a lifetime of dealing with teeth that I sometimes feel are purposely trying to make my life more complicated, even though I know logically that teeth don't have free will.

But it still feels that way to me.

If you are a person who doesn't think very much about your teeth, I envy you.

Regular readers of the blog already know that my teeth are not my strongest feature. Ever since I can remember, my teeth have been poorly formed and tend to fail on a regular basis. In the back of my mind, I know at all times I should probably be at the dentist's office.

It started as a young child when my adult teeth grew in with cavities. While I'm sure he was not actually an evil person, my local dentist tortured me with hours of painful procedures as he put in two, three, four or more fillings with each visit. Every one of my molars had cavities.

This of course led to me having a fear of dentists and made it so that as soon as I became old enough, I just stopped going unless I was in pain.

So the drama-filled relationship with my teeth has been long and steady.

About six years ago, I noticed a lump on my gum. Me being me, I just sort of ignored it. It kind of looked like a zit. I have super sensitive skin, so I often get sores in my mouth. I have ever since I was a kid.

The lump on my gum would disappear and reappear. It wasn't solid. I could push on it.

At the time, I was in the middle of travelling pretty much non-stop with my daughter. I didn't have the energy to have my gum investigated, especially since (and this is the important part) nothing was hurting. At one point, I pushed on the little lump and it felt like it popped and then disappeared. Oh good.

Fast forward a year. We had just returned from being out of town for three months. We had a short three-week stay at home before we would be leaving for Japan for another month long trip, but in the meantime my daughter had dance conventions out of town that we had to attend.

About a week after we returned, one of my teeth started hurting. I know from past experience, once tooth pain starts, it's important to get to the dentist quickly. I reluctantly made an appointment with a dentist.

Since I hadn't been to the dentist in a while, it was a dentist I had never seen before. My mode of picking dentists is to look at the list of dentists covered by our insurance and pick the one who's closet to my house. 

I remember the appointment was on a Friday morning. I fit it in between driving my daughter to her homeschool teacher appointment (an hour each way from our house) and then having to pack for leaving for the weekend for a dance convention in Orange County (which turned out to be a three hour drive on a Friday night).

I won't bore you with the details of my dental visit. I will cut to the chase: my back molar had to have an emergency root canal and the tooth in front of that molar had to be pulled because it turns out that the little lump in my gum was actually the root of my tooth and when I had felt that pop, it was my tooth's root breaking. The tooth was dead.

Um, what? You're pulling my tooth out?

The visit was a whirlwind of major dental activity, and the dentist, while perfectly competent, didn't have a particularly friendly bedside manner. I remember sitting wide-eyed as, first, he went over all the tooth replacement options for the tooth that was pulled and then talked about the procedure I'd likely have to have on the tooth that had just had the root canal since my teeth are small and there was not enough tooth, meaning he'd have to cut down the gum. (Excuse me? Cut my gum?) 

He was speaking fast, and I wasn't really absorbing what he was saying. My shocked mind translated his words into: It's going to be super expensive and very painful.

I'm pretty sure that's when I sort of mentally shut down. I simply could not process any more information. I nodded my head, explained that I was about to go out of town for four months so could he sort of just patch me up and I would deal with it when I got back?

He did just that. He put an extra sturdy temporary crown on the root-canaled tooth, sent me over to the oral surgeon who pulled the other tooth (oddly, a fast and cheap procedure), and sent me home with lots of instructions about what I was supposed to do when I returned from my trip. 

I wandered out of the office after three hours, numb: numb mouth and numb mind.

I'm not sure how I made it through the dance convention that weekend. If you don't know what a dance competition is like, I will sum it up with: loud and exhausting. It's 72 hours straight of loud music and of dealing with kids and their parents. It's 17-hour days and, if you're lucky, five or six hours of sleep. It's chaos.

I think I just went into war-zone mode. I'm not trying to make light of what an actual war experience would be like, but I just mean that I hunkered down and got through it. I don't remember it. And people I've asked said they didn't realize anything was wrong. (Part of that is because I didn't really know how to tell people I'd just had a tooth pulled.)


When we're kids, parents (and dentists) make a big deal about "adult" teeth. There's an emphasis put on how they're permanent—they're forever.

Forever...that is, until they're pulled out. 

Losing one of my teeth was scary. I felt as if I was missing part of myself. I felt on the shallowest of levels that I had failed an aspect of being an adult because one of my "permanent" teeth was no longer there.

So I didn't talk about it. I shoved some gauze in my mouth, kept my head down, and wore a scarf to cover my swollen jaw. I took copious amounts of Advil and got through the dance convention weekend. 

A couple of weeks later, we were gone on another set of trips for four months and, not surprisingly, I didn't go back to the dentist when we returned later that year.

In fact, I never went back to that dentist.

Fast forward three years.

My "temporary" crown finally dissolved. (Although props to that dentist who definitely put an extremely sturdy temporary crown on.)  I had to finally deal with the tooth that had the root canal. This led to pretty much two years of dealing with teeth that were literally crumbling out of my mouth. After two years of working with a dentist who I've come to trust, I finally dealt with my missing tooth.

The missing tooth had been weighing on my mind because somewhere, in all the information that the original dentist had spewed at me that awful Friday afternoon, was the fact that the jaw bone, without a tooth, will deteriorate. If you wait too long to replace a tooth, you wind up needing bone grafts which definitely sound more painful and more expensive.

So, I finally made the jump and initiated the process of doing the tooth implant.

And honestly, after five years of fretting about it, it wasn't really that big a deal.

Was it painful? Yes. Was it expensive? Extremely. But it wasn't as painful, complicated, or expensive as I had built it up to be in my mind. My mind had completely turned getting a tooth implant into a fictional monumental event, preventing me for many years from dealing with the reality of it. I had created a million scenarios in my mind why I shouldn't or couldn't do it.

And the reality was, as is often the case, not as complicated as I imagined it.

But what really surprised me was that while I never completely got used to the feeling of my missing tooth, suddenly having a tooth back in my mouth felt even more strange.

All of the teeth around the missing tooth had had dental work done on them. So when the implant was finally in, my mouth felt so strange. It reminded me of what it felt like when I had a retainer. All the teeth around the new tooth were sore. In fact, all the teeth were sore. There were a million little adjustments being made.

And I'm particularly sensitive, so I could feel the teeth around my new tooth moving. They felt loose. I could feel them wiggling ever so slightly. In addition, it was painful to chew on that side of my mouth. I hadn't properly chewed on the right side of my mouth for five years. Five years of crowns and fillings that had never really been tested.


So I continued to not use that side of my mouth. I would tentatively take a couple chews on the right side, confirm it was still painful, and then return to chewing on the other side of my mouth.

A week later, while flossing on the trusty left side of my mouth, my floss got stuck. And as I pulled on it, I felt something cave. Was it part of my tooth? Was it a filling? I wasn't sure.

I gently probed the tooth with my tongue, there was definitely a gaping hole where there had not been one previously. There wasn't any pain, fortunately, but I couldn't believe it.

I had just completed the process of the tooth implant. My dental insurance was maxed out, and my mental dental capacity was beyond maxed out.

The old me would probably have ignored it. But the new me, the older and wiser me, the me with a dentist whom I knew and trusted, decided not to be an idiot, so I called and made an appointment.

I had a failed filling. One of the fillings that my childhood dentist had painfully inserted decades before had collapsed.

So the filling had to be removed and replaced.

This meant I couldn't chew on the left side of my mouth.

This meant I had to chew on the right side of my mouth—the new tooth side of my mouth. The side where things still felt really weird, and it still hurt to bite down on things.

I seriously thought about just drinking liquids for two weeks. But then I decided to not be stubborn.

After every dental procedure, I've found that it takes a while before the new part of my mouth adjusts. If I have a new crown, the crown always feels wrong for a couple of days. It always takes a while for the rest of my mouth to accept the new part. I'm not sure if it's because things need to adjust physically or if it's that mentally, my mind has to adjust to accepting the new addition.

During the two week period while I had to wait for my new filling to arrive (they're like crowns now, porcelain and created in a lab) I slowly re-learned how to chew on the right side of my mouth. My teeth felt fragile. I felt like every time I bit down that something would break. (Honestly this has happened so it's not just me being afraid.) But day-by-day, my teeth slowly moved and adjusted. And my mind accepted the changes and adjusted.

And it made me realize how much I had adjusted during the years of my missing tooth—only chewing on the left side of my mouth. I remember how awkward it felt having a big gaping hole on the right side of my mouth. I remember adjusting to the fact that when I brushed my teeth, there was a place where I could feel the brush against my gums.

I remembered building up the courage to finally just tell people I'd had a tooth pulled. I remembered when I first visited my current dentist and felt embarrassed explaining that I was missing a tooth. I remembered when I'd had the tooth above my missing tooth crowned and wondering how they could do that without a bottom tooth. There had been so many changes between the time my tooth was pulled and when I had the new one implanted.

And every time, my mouth and my mind adjusted.

Sure enough, slowly but surely the pain decreased on the right side of my mouth. My teeth stopped moving and seemed sturdy. And even more slowly my mind adjusted. I re-learned to trust the right side of my mouth.

So here I am—for the first time in five years, the teeth on both sides of my mouth are functional. And for the first time in five years there's no pain. 

Have you had similar experiences of avoiding something because mentally you simply didn't want to have to deal with it?

I've done that too many times to count. I'm still doing it. I try to deal with it by taking a small stickie, writing those "have to's" on it, and putting it on my laptop. This forces me to stare at the stuff I don't want to deal with until I finally do deal with it. My reward is that, with great gusto, I get to cross it off that "stickie list."


My fear of dentists is mostly mental. Is there a Buddhist teaching for people to overcome mental blocks they have?

I'd say that teaching is found in the Buddha's first noble truth, which points out that there's no way around it: life is going to include unpleasant experiences. In the new edition of my book, How to Be Sick, I've named it "The Buddha's List," and getting what we don't want is one of the things on that list. The condition of your teeth is definitely something you didn't want for yourself and I didn't want for you.

I've found that learning to accept that life will contain its share of experiences I'd rather not have makes things easier mentally because it keeps me from adding anger and resentment into the mix, which only makes me feel worse. If life is inevitably going to be unpleasant at times, stewing in resentment and anger over a particular unpleasant occurrence is a waste of energy because it doesn't change things. Sometimes I say to myself that I know I don't want to do something but I have to (often for my health and safety). Then, mental block or not, I forge ahead and try not to add those painful emotions, such as resentment, to the mix. 

I'm so sorry about your teeth Mara. They've always been a problem. I had no idea it would continue into your adult life as it has.