Extraction

            On Thursday afternoon I started to feel a cold coming on. At 14:00 I decided to take a siesta but I felt too uncomfortable to sleep, so I got up after half an hour. When I have a cold I always feel spicy soups help, so I heated up the can of curried cauliflower and lentil soup that I got from the food bank. I felt better after eating it.

            At 17:00 I left for my appointment with the dentist. The waiting room was empty when I arrived. I asked the receptionist if they’d stayed open just for me. She smiled and nodded, but a couple showed up for an appointment a few minutes later.

            There was an attractive, big boned Latin American dental assistant walking slowly down the hallway away from me. When she walked back up towards me she gave me a nice sultry look.

            While waiting I read some of Anne Carson’s “Autobiography of Red”. It’s the second book on the reading list for my Canadian Poetry course next year. It’s a novel in poetry form told as if it were a Greek myth about a red winged monster, but it’s really the story of a modern boy going through adolescence and dealing with his sexuality.

            The dentist called me into the first little room near where I’d been sitting. He took one look at what was left of my tooth and told me that it couldn’t be saved. He said I had two options: a $500 denture or a $2000 implant but he assured me that my Green Shield insurance plan from the University of Toronto would not cover either one of them. I asked if there was any kind of monthly plan for payment but he said they don’t have anything like that, other than that $250 has to be paid at the start of the fitting of the denture and then the other $250 later. I told him I was a singer and wondered if there would be a danger of a denture popping out during singing. He said it was possible but he had yet had a patient that was a singer, so he didn’t know for sure. I looked this up online later and most people say it’s okay to sing with dentures and that their popping out only happens maybe once to a small percentage of singers.

            I wondered if any harm would come from just leaving the tooth the way it was for a while. He seemed to misunderstand my question and answered that the hole wasn’t going to heal. I told him I was talking about the gap, and I got the impression he was being a bit of an asshole when he told me, “That’s not going to heal either.” I knew I was risking getting a crank dentist when I took an evening appointment. He finally told me that it wouldn’t do any harm just to leave the tooth as it was.

            I lamented that there don’t seem to be a lot of options for the poor. He thought for a second and asked, “Are you on Ontario Works?”  I answered, “Yes”. He said he hadn’t thought to ask before because I always get my work done under Green Shield, but told me I am covered for one denture every five years by Ontario Works. It surprised me that Ontario Works would offer something that Green Shield didn’t, since most of the stuff I’ve had done at Smile City wouldn’t be covered by Ontario Works.

            Although I think I would prefer getting an implant, it looks like the denture is my only option if I don’t want to look like a gap-toothed hillbilly. He said that the fitting couldn’t be done until a month after the extraction because the area needs that much time to heal. I suppose that’s the case for the implant as well.

            So I said for him to go ahead with pulling the old tooth out. He had an assistant whom I hadn’t seen before, a short, Latin American woman in her early middle age. She had a very kind manner that helped to set me at ease. I overheard her tell the dentist about two tests she’d taken that evening and that she’d passed one of them but failed the one about identifying certain instruments.

            The dentist froze my upper mouth and I could feel some of the numbness from the tip of my nose down. He yanked away at my tooth; some pieces of it broke off in the process. I had to pick a small fragment out between my fingers. Finally he pulled the whole thing out and said I was done. His assistant put some gauze in the gap and gave me a package of extra gauze to take home, telling me to change it every half an hour. Then she asked if I wanted to see my tooth. She sort of sounded like a midwife asking if I wanted to see my baby. I said, “Okay”. It was still born, with just the root and no crown. I thanked her and then she thanked me with much more strength. I thanked the dentist and he responded non-verbally in what sounded halfway between a hum and a grunt. As I was unlocking my bike, I saw him rushing out the door and heading up Bloor Street.

            I rode to No Frills at Lansdowne and Dundas. As I was locking my bike I overheard a couple of women say that were waiting to take the every fifteen minutes shuttle bus that’s being provided for customers of the other No Frills at Jameson and King that’s while it’s closed for renovations.

            I wanted to get grapes, but they were expensive, so I didn’t bother. I bought some bananas and a bag of apples. I realized that I didn’t need much of anything, since I still had lots of turkey and bread. I bought things I wouldn’t normally buy like orange juice and honey. The express checkout person didn’t smile of even thank me. I was feeling depressed about the idea of having to get a denture and I wondered if she picked up on that feeling.

            When I got home I pulled out the gauze, but I was still bleeding so I changed it. There were two more strips of gauze in the package. After half an hour the bleeding continued, so I cut a strip of gauze in two and used half, By 21:00 I realized I wasn’t going be able to have dinner because every time I took the gauze out, blood started dripping on my tongue. That was also my last piece of gauze. I remembered though that I had something similar in a small package that had been sitting on my bathroom shelf for at least a decade. It was similar to gauze, but I think it was of a slightly higher quality. It was probably the kind of thing they use as a sponge during surgery. I found it and put it into the gap and it looked like I’d have to keep it there all night.

            I had planned on watching Suicide Squad that night but since I couldn’t eat dinner and my mouth was uncomfortable because of the gauze, I just decided to go to bed at 21:30 and hoped that I wasn’t still bleeding the next morning.

            I woke up at midnight and removed the folded surgical sponge. There was a lot less blood on it than on the other pieces of gauze. I took a pee and looked in my mouth again to find that I was still bleeding a slight trickle. There was nothing I could do about that because I’d run out of gauze, so I just accepted the fact that I’d have to swallow my own blood. I went back to bed, feeling less uncomfortable, I guess, without the lump of cotton in my mouth, but there were so many other things to be uncomfortable about that I didn’t experience any relief.