Episode 11: Tim goes to the dentist before his insurance runs out, dealing with someone trying to stick his gums full of pinholes and shove bits of dead people inside.
~
Turns out, teeth do just die. You hit them right or make fun of them too enthusiastically without making sure they know it’s a joke, and they offer their neck up to the reaper. Take me, they say. For I cannot, for one more day, do the job I was put here for. Though I was brushed and flossed and cared for just as I needed, I was also bumped a little harder than I would’ve liked. One cannot expect me to carry on after such humiliation. Here comes my grayness, and perhaps an infection. I shall gift you pain just as you provided it to me.
Any other bone in your body just needs time to heal. You give it time and rest, and it will take the ingredients it needs from the food you eat and make more of itself to bind back together. Imagine a ship that has hit a rock. A hole has opened and water rushes in. Any other bone in your body is like a crew that leaps into action, working together to patch the hole and bailing out the water. Before long, the ship is floating and sailing just as it should, just as it did before. Now, imagine a boat with a pinhole-sized leak. Water is dripping into the hull at a rate that could be stopped by a well-placed finger, or a single strip of duct tape. A crew reminiscent of teeth will look at the leak with drooping shoulders and shaking heads. Nothing we can do, they say. Such a shame. Everyone overboard. She’s going down.
The same can be said, as I have learned recently, about your gums and the bone beneath them. Both, for me, are receding. The dentist, on a previous visit, explained to me that if you have aggressive orthodontics, as I did, they can make your gums and the bone beneath your gums recede. So you finally get a perfect smile, get all your teeth into the correct position, and they start falling out because what held them in place receded like the tide from the abuse it took in the moving process.
~
If you enjoy westerns like True Grit or The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, check out Tim’s western novel, Dust, available on Amazon in eBook form in addition to being read on the podcast.
For other resources, visit timdrugan.com.