I'm willing to bet that even the modern Chinese calendar doesn't include a "year of the dentist", but there is no doubt that 1999 will go down in personal history as just that. Not the year I finished my required doctoral courses, or the year I wrote my comprehensives.  Not the year of the family reunion, or the year I finally cut my hair short. (I did the latter last week.)   Nope. 1999 is the year of the dentist, a year like no other.

I'm one of those people who got to be over 20 without ever having a tooth frozen, and now I can't even have my teeth cleaned without freezing.  It's not for me, of course; it's because the hygenists can't stand to see my pain.  That's what they say, really!  But that means that I can't have all my teeth cleaned at once, since my dentist doesn't like freezing your whole mouth at once, just in case you need it for something.  So, it started with a cleaning, or the first half of one, anyway.

Then came one of those "Oh, you thought your life was doing just fine.  Well, take *this*!" On comes the excuciating toothache. (My sister-in-law swears that toothaches are worse than childbirth, and she's had four kids!)   That led to an hour in the chair of an emergency, on-call-on-Sunday dentist, who announced at the end of the hour that I needed a root canal and she wasn't able to do it.   Great, I thought.  Things are going from bad to worse.  I was right.

Then I went back to my dentist (who lives half-way to the next large city, she's so far into the 'burbs).  She worked on it for an hour or two, and announced that she couldn't do anything either.  (To her credit, she didn't want to charge me for that visit, despite it having taken an hour of her time, and several X-rays of the affected tooth.)  So she referred me to do an endodontist.  I'd never heard of them either, but they're the root canal specialists.  He said he thought he could fix it, and it would cost about $1,000 whether he could or not, and could I please bring the first half to the next appointment, and the remaining amount to the third appointment.  Which I did.

The first appointment took an hour.  The second one took over two hours. Memorable, he said.  An S-shaped root.  And of course, only one "wall" of the tooth was left, and he'd only put in a temporary filling, so I had better get back to my dentist.  Well, by this time, I was about to register for the summer semester (writing comps), which meant I had to be a full-time student. That meant I'd have dental insurance.  So I decided to wait.  But then, before the appointed date arrived, I realized that I had either broken a tooth or a filling or both.   So much for waiting.

I had broken a tooth.  It got fixed.  The temporary filling got replaced.  And an appointment was made with yet another specialist to put on crowns (one on the most recent root canal, another on the tooth that had been root-canal-led before, and had now broken and been repaired and needed to be crowned, too.)  Then, my dentist reminded me, she'd not done a complete check-up in years, and what better time to do fillings and so on than when they were covered by insurance?   So, we did the check-up.

No new cavities, was the good news.  Six very old ones that needed replacing was the bad news.  This was done over two appointments, the second of which was today.  Two fillings the first day, four today.  And I still have the crowns to look forward to.  And these won't be simple, because my teeth are too small for crowns, which means that this specialist will burn some of my jawbone, and make it longer so that they can put a crown on the teeth.  And for this, I'm paying big money, since I'll be back to being a part-time student and I've used up my $1,000 worth of dental reimbursements anyway.

I find myself nostalgic for the days when the dentist was also the hygenist, when root canals were rare, and crowns were unheard of. Of course, there was also less use of aenesthetic.  And more pain.  Or was there? More lost teeth, perhaps, but I'm wiling to be the pain factor has evened out.  At least this year. The year of the dentist indeed.

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