The Deciding Incisor: Lauren Johnson

I became friends with Lauren Johnson during our final semester at Bard College. Two days after our graduation she gave me a tour of her hometown of Great Barrington, MA and the campus of Bard’s baby cousin, Simon’s Rock. Great Barrington just happened to be where she had returned for the summer and where I had an appointment to contest a speeding ticket. Since then, Lauren has popped back into my life while visiting a mutual friend when I lived in Northampton, and again more recently in Philadelphia. In addition to being hilariously witty (see below), Lauren is a sweet and sincere friend. If I ever need to hide underground, I’m sure she and Dan will graciously let me live in the backyard of their Jersey farmhouse with the chickens.

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I am sitting reclined in an aquamarine blue dental chair, waiting to be seen by a Portuguese dentist.

I have not been to the dentist for about seven years, and all the brochures of cloud-white toothy smiles placed along the countertops are doing a marvelous job of taunting me.  

For the majority of those seven years, I have led an indulgently artistic and nomadic life bereft of dental insurance throughout the Big Apple, North Carolina, and New Jersey, where, at 29 years old, I got my first flat tire on the road to perfect oral health.

I had pretty much shrugged off going to see a dentist baring anything catastrophic, until I recently showed my husband my front tooth whose gum had been receding pretty steadily after noticing it started to look irritated. The words he spoke while painfully wincing were “Holy crap, that’s like Tales From the Crypt!”

Fine.

I signed up for an in-state no-frills dental program, picked the nearest dentist within the network, and here I am—paper bib clipped to my collar and ready for the worst.

The dentist comes in and we start with the x-rays. After each one, the lead cape draped over my chest feels heavier and heavier, and I imagine thick wads of (my) money being plunged down the toilet.

Next up is the cleaning.

Everything is going fine until she gets to The Tooth. “Ooo!,” she says, completely stopping and turning off the drill. “That hurts me just to look at it.” 

She pulls off her mask, and we proceed to have a heart-to-heart. “Why is it that you have not gotten this looked at earlier?” she tells me in her Portuguese accent. I smile and try to explain to her how tough I am. She looks at me solemnly. “You’re very young,” she says. “You have many good tooth years ahead of you, but you need to take care of this to be sure that will happen.” She says she’ll write me a referral to a specialist (more sounds of dollars flushing), and proceeds with the cleaning. I seal the deal with myself to take her advice, wincing as the electricity shoots down my legs as she finishes polishing the base of said tooth.

At 29, I never thought I’d have to start dealing with something so geriatric sounding as receding gums. And though I tend to laugh this sort of stuff off (along with things like gray hairs and how delicious prunes are), this time it’s a bit more awakening. It’s made me nervous. Not only have I been thinking about it constantly and having dreams of my teeth falling out, I’ve also resumed one of my old nervous tics of biting the insides of my cheeks. 

Gross!

When I see the specialist my dentist referred me to, what a mouth-show they will get!

All kidding aside, the timing of this instance could not be more appropriate. I, like many other of my late-twenty-something friends, have been musing about the new decade we’re entering into, and comparing our lists of Top 10 Things to Do Before I’m Thirty.  I’m pretty sure “Pay Attention to your Dental Health” will trump “Lose 10 Pounds,” and “Become a Model” (Quiz: How many models have a horror show host gumline? Zero!). However, I must say, as I grow longer in the tooth (sorry, had to), it will be learned moments like these that I’ll stow away to help me make more self-informed, wise, and adult decisions as I turn 30, 40, 50…