There's A Dead Person Living In My Mouth

It began with a Milky Way candy bar that led to a visit to the dentist for a broken tooth on November 18th. A temporary filling and another appointment would do then trick … then I would need a crown. OK ~ whatever … just fix it already … it’s already been two hours. Well, that didn't work because my drill-happy dental masochist dug too far and revealed the nerve. That fiasco led me to another dental professional who attempted a root canal. I laid there staring in the bright light with tears running down towards my ears for over an hour … not because it hurt, but because I could sense that something was not going right. After stabbing me with Novocain at least sixteen times, including injecting me directly between the tooth and gum, he was unable to numb the tooth enough to do the root canal.


By then, it’s the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. I have two options … get IV sedation and have a root canal & then a crown or get IV sedation and have the tooth removed. ???choices~choices??? It's hurting like a super-bitch rehabbing from a decade long meth addiction on a dirty bathroom floor in an abandoned Exxon station off an unused exit ramp to nowhere.

Let me just say, I am dental phobic … excessively and unreasonably … completely and unapologetically.

Finally, yesterday, I got my IV sedation (which is worth every damn penny, may I add) and had my tooth removed, #18, to be exact, so a permanent tooth implant can be performed (under sedation, I hope) at a later date.

Now I have another problem. When my tooth was removed, I had to have a bone graft … a cadaver bone is now growing inside my mouth. Maybe this isn’t as traumatic if it’s in your elbow or your pinky toe, but the thought of a dead person’s bone sitting inside my jaw, while the wound oozes and squoozes post operative gunk into my mouth is making me quite nauseous. Not so much the oozy gunk, but the idea that some of that gunk sort of “belongs” to someone else. When I finally woke up from a ten hour nap last night and began taking the prescribed meds, I wondered what the nausea pills were for … I felt fine and hadn’t eaten for the required time before sedation … apparently the nausea meds are for the fact that there’s a dead person grafting in my mouth right now.

A man? A woman? A human, I hope, but really have no way of knowing. Do they call dead animals cadavers or is that a term used only for people? Is this what people who receive organ donations go through? Of course, that’s a life-or-death matter and this is quite less significant, but is the “feeling” the same? I, for one, feel totally creeped out by the whole thing … completely and totally creeped out. How long was the bone cadavered or dead or whatever??? How much do cadaver bones go for??? When you sign your organ donation card, does that include your bones too … and which bones??? Did my dentist buy my cadaver bone or was it donated at all? If so, who “sells” their dead bones??? What kind of person does that??? I can’t even think about that right now.

The cadaver bone will grow to my jawbone and will eventually become the platform for my implant tooth. This will take four to six months. I wonder, in four to six months, when the cadaver bone becomes part of my bone … what that will mean. Is that a type of resurrection for the bone or for the spirit of the bone or for the person who once possessed and grew that bone for him or herself? As a complexly spiritual person (meaning that there isn’t one exact definition that suits my belief and faith), I am concerned about that. I am concerned about the legacy of my cadaver bone. This all sounded really crazy in my head, and now that it’s in print, it sounds even crazier, but it’s true … so why not just say it? Without the bone, I wouldn’t be able to successfully have an implant …which would lead to me losing another tooth (the one directly above sweet, little #18) … so I really do owe the cadaver something for his/her bone … right???

I wonder if this bone was specifically sent to me by the universe … am I it’s designated carrier … chosen to give it new life in order for something greater to be carried out or has the bone become a part of me … it’s destiny to augment mine in some weird cosmic way? Or, maybe, it’s just a frozen bone and it will hold my new fake tooth in place so I can scarf down caramel corn and taffy for a few more decades … hard to say at this point … but I’m anxious to find out.

So ~ I guess all that’s left to say is “Thank you, Cadaver” … good luck out there in the universe. I will always be grateful. I really do love caramel corn.