Maxigumee

My teeth are so screwed up. Seriously. It’s not even funny. Not at all. I went to the dentist on Wednesday. My father and I needed to go for this meeting about what they’re going to do about my teeth. See, for the past two years I’ve had to wear expanders. These expanders are so that these two teeth, teeth that are currently blocked from coming in by all my other teeth, can come in. Although my jaw has expanded like an inch using the expanders, they still haven’t really helped get those teeth to move much.

Sitting in my dentist’s office, he explained to us the technical tidbits of what’s going on in my mouth. He used this big term that I can’t remember and said that the same thing happened to him when he was a kid. According to him, my baby teeth came out too fast, so all my other teeth in the back scooted up to the front of the mouth, blocking other teeth that still needed to come in on a different schedule. He said that dentists nowadays don’t pull teeth so recklessly and try to preserve as many teeth as possible, hence the expanders. Even though the appliances stretched my mouth out quite a bit (you can see how so in the pictures of the two different models), those two teeth (eye teeth, I think) still won’t come on down. So. I need to get two teeth pulled, braces to hold back the other teeth, and then FAKE TEETH to fill in the holes while the other real teeth are coming down. Oh, and if one of the two teeth refuses to come down, I might need to have an oral surgeon go up there and pull it down.

So. That’s a little eensie bit terrifying. But I guess there is some news. My dentist explained to us how my bottom teeth, before the expanding, used to be also very seriously messed up. These two teeth at the corners of my bottom…. front…. area…. were kind of crooked. They were turned outward or something like that. So, as time went on, if I hadn’t gotten expanders, those two teeth could have ended up pointing completely outwards and I could have ended up looking like some sort of walrus. Or something out of Lord of The Rings. So. Yeah, at least that got done.

To tell the truth, I think the only thing that I am scared about, like REALLY, is the whole oral surgeon thing. And this is simply because it’s not my dentist doing it. I have had three dentists in my life. At my first dentist, I always refused to get anesthetic whenever we did anything, so that kind of hurt. At my second dentist, whenever I got a filling or something, I would get the novocain, but even the shot hurt after the pre-anesthetic. And then the drilling hurt a whole bunch, too. I cried. It hurt. At that point, I was not very fond of going to the dentist at all. I remember one time, I faked (or maybe my body was just so scared that it had) a coughing fit to get out of the dentist.

My third and current dentist, however, is much less painful. Now, I don’t want to get into my entire horrible oral history, but I had TWO root canals with this guy and I did not feel a thing. Not one thing. I actually came out of the dentist chair smiling, if you can believe that. The guy doesn’t even use pre-anesthetic, something that seriously freaked my out the first time he had to operate on me, but the shot itself doesn’t even hurt. At all. And believe me, I have absolutely no tolerance for pain. My dentist has some sort of fancy, modern, ultra-expensive, doodad that costs like a kagillion dollars but is very good for the patient since it’s kinda painless, I guess. Or at least I think that’s how it works. But yeah, seriously. No pain.

So all in all, even though I’m probably going to lose two teeth, I’m not too scared about it. I am much more scared about having some unfamiliar oral surgeon reaching up into my gums to yank down a tooth. I’ll probably be terrified once the day comes to take those teeth out. For now, I’m just glad I don’t look like an Uruk-Hai.