Dentist Day

Thursday, Nov. 17, 2011 - 7:08 a.m.

(I'm not back yet, you guys, but John insisted I do a writeup and post it here. So here you go!)

Yesterday, I survived the trip to the dentist intact.

The day began and ended with a problem with the apartment complex's garage door. It's just a little older than the Reagan administration and it's been manual for as long as I have lived here. Yesterday, one of the wheels jumped the track for the second or third time this year, so the door was stuck in the 'up' position unless you could hire The Incredble Hulk to pull it back down for you. We had to leave to go to the dentist, so John tried to fix it with a hammer, and when that didn't work, the neighbor Kyle, bless his heart, happened upon the scene and went and printed out a note that said please don't close the door or it will never open again, and off John and I went to the dentist. John and Kyle also each called the landlord, a man for whom a whole 'nother set of stories should be written, argh argh, and reported the problem. James Ding. He's sweet and courteous, but apparently his nephews are practicing on this building before they get they get their contractors licenses.

Our hope was that the door would be back on the track by the time we got home.

The journey there entailed a trip into the periphery of downtown, and a crossing of Market Street, which pretty much divides the easternmost quarter of San Francisco from the rest of the city. We listened to the radio and sure enough, the traffic was at a standstill pretty much while we were trying to get to our destination, courtesy of the Occupy protestors. They'd become mobile and went over to a Bank and burst through the doors and sat in there playing their bongos and putting post it notes everywhere with their slogans -- and the police were doing their best to both direct traffic and facilitate the protestors. We did some sympathetic magick and called the dentist office to report that we were stopped by protestors and might be about ten minutes late -- and by doing that, very suddenly the traffic began moving again. The bulk of the Occupy participants had moved beyond the intersection we'd been trying to cross, and we finally made it to the parking garage, and at a trot, we got to the dentist's office with about three minutes to spare.

My dentist is Dr Marquis. She is twenty-nine again, (ahem, cough, just like me!) she speaks Spanish and English, and she is very easy to talk to. As far as my teeth go, she is by far the coolest and most gentle person who has ever touched them. My pediatric dentist was a nightmarish and impatient little cheese wad of a man who had no tolerance for scared children; if we reached up in fear, he'd slap us. If we cried, he didn't give a damn, because most of the time it meant our mouths were open; he collected vintage dental tools, and said if we didn't calm down and behave, he'd use those on us instead of the modern ones.

But Dr Marquis is the complete opposite. She's answered every question, and told me to speak up when I have an idea. I have never actually enjoyed going to a dentist before, so it's stunning to be able to let go of all of the internal and emotional clenching I'd been doing whenever a dentist had been near me.

The procedure went well. I was there to have molds taken of my current set of teeth, have my bite measured, and Dr Marquis and I were going to select the color that my replacement teeth were going to be. Since I am going to have all but three teeth removed, she showed me a very cool trick that absolutely no other dentist or tooth expert of any kind had ever shown me: I was going to have my new teeth matched to the whites of my eyes. Apparently I'm pretty bright-eyed for somebody my age, because the color she picked out for me was one shade down from the brightest available. I had been concerned that the mold-taking process itself might cost me a couple of my loosest teeth, but somehow both of the top and the bottom molds were taken with a minimum of hassle, and none of my teeth hitchhiked a ride out in the resin-mobile.

At the end of the appointment, I was standing out at the front desk and thanking Dr Marquis for being so kind and careful, when suddenly, I began to cry a little bit. There honestly had never ever been a time where I hadn't been terrified of having my teeth worked on, and since my car accident in 1983, all I'd had done before was to wear partials that filled gaps, versus partials that looked good. My experience with Dr Marquis was a profound and complete change from that. Up until that afternoon, I'd just been in the frame of mind where I was fortunate to be alive with injuries from which I could recover -- I'd been wearing no seatbelt and my mouth and face had hit the dashboard pretty damned hard -- and I was fortunate to have replacement teeth that were functional.

But to actually have my dentist tell me it was okay to finally have a smile that was beautiful as well as servicable? That was light years away from anything else I'd ever allowed myself to hope for.

And figuring all of that out is what made me cry there in the office and thank my dentist over and over again.

So the new fangs are underway, and I'll be heading to the oral surgeon for the extractions as soon as I'm told when the appointment will be.

For a change -- I'm not scared of doing this.

And the plan is for me to have a cosmetically beautiful smile again for the first time in thirty years. I mean, yes, thank you, I've been told my smile has Lots Of Personality --

But now there's a chance it might actually be pretty again, too.

---

John and I returned home -- we cut through the Haight neighborhood and I swear I received a contact high -- and when we drove up, to our horror, we discovered that the garage door had been shut. There would now be no way to get into the garage again without assistance. After a few minutes of pacing and vociferous lividity, John skulked over to the gated entry, unlocked it, went into the garage to throw away some stuff --

And discovered the new automatic garage door opener that had been installed while we were away that afternoon. John noticed the new keypad that was next to the apapartment's breaker box -- installed on the OUTSIDE of the security gate, mumble mutter -- (I mumbled to John that the code was probably something easy for burglars to figure out, like 1 2 3 4 or something equally inane) and then Kyle came bounding down the stairs for a smoke, and Gwyneth in the apartment below us also came down to let her dogs have a run, and between them, we discovered that Mr Ding and his fixit satellites had been there pretty quickly for a change, that we could have our own remotes for the door for a fifty-dollar deposit -- and that the code was, brace yourselves -- 1 2 3 4.

Yes, we already changed it and let the other tenants know. Sigh.

So that's what happened on Dentist Day.

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