Toothache My Eye

Minor medical crisis unearths a lifetime of bad vibes

I went out Sunday and played pinball with some dear friends I don’t see often enough. It was a rare weekend off and I don’t socialize that much in this era of my life, so it was a great change of pace to get out and hug some folks and hit a few tables. I remain befuddled by what they can do with a pinball machine in the modern day, but I actually held my own on a few games and I had a blast.

Within an hour or two of going to bed, I realized I had a toothache. It came on fairly suddenly and by two or three in the morning, it was enough to keep waking me up. I got up and took some Tylenol and rooted around in the medicine cabinet until I found a gnarly old tube of Anbesol from the bad old days.

It’s been a while since I wrote about it, so to briefly summarize: as a more or less feral kid who got real into drinking giant fountain sodas early, I’d wrecked my teeth by junior year of high school, and regular trips to the dentist didn’t become regular events until much later in life. I made several false starts getting everything fixed, and I spent a good chunk of my adult life, including most of my time as a public performer, with the dreaded missing side teeth and/or discolored front choppers.

It was just a couple years ago when we had an “if not now, when?” moment after a bad experience with yet another dentist and I wound up with the exceptional practice I now see.

In two years we’ve sunk a good bit of a college education into bridges, root canals and crowns, and I’ve gone from a man who didn’t smile in his wedding photos and stopped buying almonds to someone who can talk and chew and act like a real boy out in public. There’s still more to do, but visually and functionally, it’s a different world than I’ve known my whole adult life. I’m still not used to it when I see it in mirrors.