So a while back it was impressed upon me that I should add more whole fruits to my diet, and Berkeley Bowl got in a shipment of extremely tasty organic Pink Lady apples, so I got into the habit of eating an apple every day. Earlier this week I noticed that when I bit into an apple slice my top front right tooth would react with a little twinge. I didn't think much of it until Friday morning, when the tooth started to hurt without any prompting. I'd just be sitting there and, zap!, I'd get a sensation that felt like a really cold needle jabbing the root. This would happen every minute or so for something like half an hour. Then it would go away for an hour or two and I'd think, "Oh, I guess it's nothing urgent." Then it would come back. I had plans to meet up for lunch with my co-writer on the movie script, so I made a mental note to swing by a dentist's office and make an appointment. I poked around online and found a couple that seemed widely recommended; one wasn't open on Fridays, so the other one won. Naturally, I wound up dilly-dallying to the point that I wouldn't be able to stop by the office on the way to lunch, so I figured I'd go there afterwards. Elizabeth suggested that I make an appointment by phone. I hate phones, but I made the call. When I described my symptoms the receptionist said it sounded serious and that I should come by at 2:15 that same day. I had a pleasant lunch at Eccolo and then went to the dentist's office.

Earlier this month I'd had some circulatory problems that were giving me some similar zapping pains in my legs out of the blue, and as I was a little freaked out by Star Foster's sudden death from a pulmonary embolism, I'd made a doctor's appointment to make sure it wasn't a clot or something. The doctor said it was nothing and that I just needed to get more potassium and keep walking around more (as I've been trying to do). But when the dental X-ray came back, it turned out that this time it wasn't nothing. Because this was an emergency appointment, I was assigned to the practice's junior dentist, one Dr. Tran — I'd guess she was around 25. She said that it looked like I had a huge cavity right at the gum line and that if I wanted she could deal with it immediately and see whether a filling would be sufficient, but that since it was so close to the nerve, it was more likely than not that I'd need a root canal. The tooth had actually started acting up again while I was waiting for the X-ray, so I decided to have it taken care of right then.

So I got moved from the exam room into the serious-dental-work room and got shot up with novocaine. I also had to put on goggles. Drill drill drill, scrape scrape scrape. It was interesting listening to her call out instructions to her assistant — "Butterfly clamp." "Perchlorate." — in a very serious but still awfully young-sounding voice. "Yeah, that nerve is really hot," she said after a few minutes. "Actually... this isn't right. I need to go call upstairs." What had happened, she later explained, was that as soon as she had opened up the cavity it had started bleeding like crazy, so she thought this was going to be a big emergency, but then she'd cleaned away some of the tissue and the bleeding had stopped, so she didn't know what to make of it and needed an endodontal evaluation. Calls were made, appointments were rejiggered, and I was sent up to the seventh floor with a big hole in the back of my tooth. (One nice thing was that I was only charged for the X-ray.)

At this point I really felt the need to talk to someone, so I called Elizabeth, but she wasn't home — I'd forgotten that at that moment she was actually giving a presentation to the president of the University of Victoria. But the thing is, what I really needed was someone who had been through this and whom I could trust to give it to me straight. So I called Jennifer, who talked me through the procedure and long-term results and was generally great about fielding what must have been a pretty weird call to get out of the blue. Then I had to wait around for a while, during which time the novocaine wore off; the pain got pretty significant for a while, but then receded, and eventually I was called into an exam room with a pretty view of Berkeley's south side stretching all the way to campus. There I was introduced to the endodontist, who had the unlikely name of Priya O'Callaghan and whom I think it is fair to describe as traffic-stoppingly gorgeous. She was around my age and I was struck by the fact that she also shared my speech patterns; I felt like I was talking to Tabetha or someone else I'd grown up with. Anyway, she whipped out a pencil and sketched out the situation on the instrument tray. It turned out that I was suffering from something called a "resorption," a phenomenon in which, for reasons not currently understood, nerve cells in a tooth which previously had been keeping it alive start eating away at it instead. The "cavity" the dentist had found was actually the damage that had been inflicted by these cells. Resorption is normally associated with some sort of trauma, and it turns out that braces count. I had my braces taken off twenty years ago, but apparently that's how it works; you're fine for twenty years, and then one day your tooth starts hurting and you go in and it turns out that the only recourse is extraction.

I was relatively lucky, I was told, in that there was still a pretty good chance that the shell of the tooth could be saved and I wouldn't have to go to my next tutoring session looking like Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel. So, emergency root canal it was, or at least the first half of one — I had the pulp taken out so that I wouldn't spend the weekend rolling around on the ground praying for death, and have to return next week for packing and sealing. The worst part was getting shot up with novocain again, which felt like the needle was going past my gum, up through my nose and into the center of my head. (Nerves are weird.)

Or at least, that was the worst part physically. Financially, the $1750 price tag is a pretty tough hit to take and effectively chops a month off the time I have left to work on the book before I have to go back to teaching full-time... assuming that this is the only affected tooth and I don't end up going through my entire life savings. Existentially, it's hard to find a better reminder that you're over the hill than losing your fucking teeth. The little ticket I was given says "Dx– Irreversible" on it, meaning that there was no treatment for the underlying disease but also a reminder that my body isn't trying to grow anymore and will no longer be providing me with replacement parts for the ones I lose.

Anyway, as I walked from the medical building out to where I'd parked, I witnessed a car accident on Ashby. It didn't seem like there'd been any injuries, but I certainly saw why they call 'em "crumple zones."


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