Vic Socotra

14 January 2009

Happy Days

(The construction site)

My mouth felt like an Iranian road crew had been working on a project overnight, and some of the concrete had not set up properly.

I took a couple Motrin first thing to see if I could kill the dull ache that radiated from the jaw upward toward my temple. I had forgotten that dental surgery is surgery none-the-less.

Dr. Rohani, the petite Persian with the merry dark eyes and jet-black close-cropped hair had spent nearly two hours in my mouth, embarked on the next step of a reconstruction that has stretched across the years.

The last of the amalgams is gone now, with the sweetly acrid smell of the drill, and the pre-molar was sawn up and carted away with the trash.

She will crown it in a couple weeks. I asked for gold, but I am going to get porcelain, a B-3 on the color chart, since she says the tooth is on the smile line, not that I do much of that these says. I trust her judgment, which is a good thing in a person who is drilling close to the nerve.

Apparently I am paying for years of military dentistry, and had no idea what I was getting myself into. The last appointment of my active duty life was at Bethesda. I was on terminal leave and had to find parts of the uniform to wear to the bustling medical campus. Something moved on the upper rear molar when I flossed it, and I thought it was not good.

I managed to see a couple reservists who labored mightily to reconstitute the enamel, but after an hour of trying, gave up and yanked the thing. I went back to work with gauze tucked into the gaping hole.

In civilian life, new to the idea, I had a dental plan and the puzzling concept of choice.

I asked a co-worker about dental professionals in the area, and received a recommendation. With some trepidation, I made a call on the offices of the Highman clinic in Falls Church, and the adventure began.

All the old fillings had to go, I was told; a quarterly schedule of visits to arrest the continuing consequences of the bad habits I routinely stick in my mouth; new facia for the chopping teeth, and a couple crowns.

It was an ambitious program, but Dr. Highman let me in on the vision only gradually. If he had presented the entire program as an acquisition briefing, I would have turned it down as wildly impractical and entirely unaffordable.

Presented piecemeal and in times of crisis, it simply worked itself out. Over time, Dr. Rohani joined the practice and in time assumed custody of my mouth. She commenced an ambitious construction project, drilling tunnel and erecting dams according to an undisclosed master plan.

I believe that with the last of the ancient amalgam gone, and the last crown set in place, I am confident that the building program will be complete, the last vestiges of ship-board painless dentistry removed.

I presume we will, at that point, enter into a new golden age of dental care, maintenance only, with significant savings to the company plan, and to my pocket book.

I thought that as Carol the receptionist ran $1,600 on the credit card. I did not ask to retain the chips of enamel that had been ground away. In my jewelry box are the four wisdom teeth that I saved from their individual removals years ago. One took leave of me in an office in Grand Rapids, pulled by a dentist whose name I do not recall. Another was ripped from me in Ann Arbor, while I was a rebellious student. The third departed me a chair in the old clinic on Ford Island, in placid Pearl Harbor.

A Japanese bomb had cratered the courtyard there, leaving a hole slightly larger than the one at the back of my jaw. The last took leave of me in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, in the dental clinic of the USS Forrestal.

As I walked to the car, it occurred to me that if things go according to plan, and they cremate me before heading over to Arlington, the only thing left of me will be those things that were taken away.

Odd. Of course, if may not work out that way. Dr. Rohani may have some new announcement about the master plan at my next visit. Perhaps she will tell me that all the teeth will have come out to be sandblasted, or Simonized in the big new infrastructure initiative. Everything old will be new again, just like they are saying downtown.

Happy Days are here again. I would have whistled if the topical anesthetic had permitted it.

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