Coca-Cola rots your teeth

My dentist spent the morning drilling into the bottom-left side of my mouth. One premolar and two molars.

Grind, grind, grind.

The drill is a little atomizer, and tooth bone-dust fills the air and you smell it and you breathe it in. You breathe your own bone. And it smells burnt. Flecks of tooth fly out of your mouth and land on your shirt.

His office is right next to the public garden in downtown Boston, on the sunny side of Beacon Street. Right next to Cheers, in fact.

After three hours of drilling, before he could affix the temporary plastic cap, I took a break to stretch my legs and use the bathroom. Three hours in the dentist chair is a long time. The bathroom had a mirror. Should I look? Can I look? I did.

And oh, the horror.

The gory sight of what remained of my mouth after the morning’s excavation will not soon leave me. There was blood, there was raw exposed gum, there were bone fragments and there was not much tooth. There were the remains of three teeth. Three devastated teeth. Three tooth corpses. Three little stumps. Three little mounts for porcelaine and gold. But they weren’t my teeth anymore.

It was like the worst tooth dream you’ve ever had.

The face staring back at me was the blood-and-bone-flecked face of a lunatic with terrible bedhead and bloody stumps for teeth. It was like staring at my own mortality. Looking extinction in the face.

After the novacaine wore off, the pain was blinding and unbearable, and neither acetaminophin nor ibuprofin nor oxycontin did a damn thing, and so I had to find an endodontist and get a root canal immediately.

That was pretty fascinating, and entirely painless. The premolar was the problem, and my root was 22 millimeters long. Tiny precise screws of steadily increasing diameter are used to progressively hollow out the pulpy interior of the tooth (or what remains of it), and the resulting cavity is filled with the exact same material used on the insides of golf balls. The whole process took about 20 minutes, and all the pain is gone.

All in all, a somewhat traumatizing day. I’ve been resisting the urge to lie on the floor in the fetal position most of the evening.