Leaving a part of me behind

This is a wistful title for a post about dentistry. I am having a tooth removed and replaced with an bionic tooth next week. I don't think that's what they're really called, but I prefer to think of it that way. I believe the correct term is an implant, which has an overly intrusive feeling about it.

I am fortunate in that the dentist doing this work for me is at the absolute pinnacle of the field. He's been teaching reconstructive dentistry at Penn for years and writes textbooks on it, and has developed a lot of the techniques that other dentists use. He was a lucky find for me, because I have terrible teeth, and the only reason this is my first implant is the work that he did for me nearly 30 years ago when I first started seeing him.

Before getting to see him, I was in a lot of pain in the toothal area, to adapt Woody Allen's parlance. Because it started of course on a Friday afternoon, I couldn't go see my regular guy, so I was left with a Doc-In-The-Box. This is the phrase used by doctors with regular practices to describe strip mall Urgent Care centers and their doctors. I don't think it's meant as a compliment.

I'd never been to one of these before, except when I was in Lake Placid once and came down with bronchitis. A nurse practitioner there prescribed the antibiotics one prescribes for bronchitis and that was it. This place near me has a sign saying it has dental services, so Saturday morning there I was.

I came in and the place was all but deserted. There was a dentist there, but nobody to help him, so I needed to wait until someone, who I never saw and sounded like he knew nothing, came to assist by bringing him instruments. As far as I could tell, everything he put in my mouth was coming from a sealed, sanitized package (or they were tearing paper behind me to fool me). He cleaned around it and said there might be some infection, so he prescribed me antibiotics (which ultimately helped reduce the pain). He also suggested that they take an x-ray, which I considered but rejected when I saw this sign on the wall in front of me (and I am absolutely not making this up).

Reads kind of like a ransom note, doesn't it? So I expressed my preference to have my own dentist take the x-ray, and as it turned out, the tooth needed to go. Bye-bye tooth. The weird thing is that my dentist said it didn't look like the kind of tooth that belonged in that spot in my mouth, and that I might have my wisdom teeth instead of regular molars. I seem to remember having my wisdom teeth removed, so this is mysterious, but it's a story for another day.