Self-care: Dental Appointments
In the past week or so I've experienced almost the most physically painful thing of my life so far. I say 'almost' because there's one bodily trauma that hurt for longer, greater and deeper than this. One.
I knew it was going to hurt, probably quite a lot. But nothing prepared me for the sheer, blinding, imploding levels of pain that would follow when I sat in the dentist's chair.
Voluntarily, I might add...
Because I had my teeth whitened.
You're perhaps thinking "How vain!" or "Well, I had my teeth whitened and it wasn't so bad..." Bear with me, because not all people are the same person, and you're not living my story, in my little broken body.
Rest assured, this whole process wasn't about vanity – though looking nice sure helps boost the old self esteem – it was about erasing history, and in the erasure being such an expensive (and now I know unexpectedly painful) process, that I'll never put myself through it again.
Thus I close another door on a me I used to be, and whose skin I'll never let myself step back into. Ever.
History to burn
Here's one of the whys: my Dad died a few years ago, of cancer.
We had a strange and conflicted relationship, my Dad and I. Let's just say he chose unwisely in his dealings with me, on a great many occasions – and leave it at that. I whispered forgiveness into his ear before we turned off the machines that were keeping his body alive; he went away to wherever consciousness goes when it's released from a body; the grieving process began.
Did I love him? Yes. Was he a good man? Only sometimes. But he was my Dad, so his sudden and unexpected death hurt. It still hurts.
I've made peace with the story that ended before I was ready for it to (more or less...) but it's still a stiletto knife to the senses to be reminded of him sometimes, and then to remember that he's gone.
I'm reminded often, because I see his features when I catch my reflection. Feminised, but present, the lines of his face are etched in mine, especially when I'm carrying too much adipose.
The little rounded eyes with crinkles.
The flat, pinched cheeks.
The too-big skewiff nose.
The top lip thinner than the bottom.
The not-a-jawline that sort of slopes into a double chin like justwhatisthataboutanyway?
The teeth.
The overbite, plus the angles of too many teeth crammed into a jaw too small, so they lay higgledy-piggledy in my mouth like shaken up Scrabble tiles.
And, of course, the notably creamy colour of the enamel.
I like my face well enough, but these are the dimensions of my profile, and in this I am my father's daughter.
Those teeth though. My own set had yellowed from years of abuse, and started to remind me of my Dad's rather-less-than-pearly-whites every time I gazed into the looking glass, or saw myself in photographs.
Time takes a cigarette, and puts it in your mouth
Even before my Dad passed I was already fostering a rather tidy little alcohol problem, but after he died things amped up a notch or ten. Grief will do that.
Drinking a really, gargantuanly huge amount fucks up your teeth in a number of ways. The first being that, for me, drinking naturally led to smoking. Always.
For a while I was a smoker, then I chose not to do that any more on a daily basis, because if you do it when you're stressed, and you're always stressed, you'll do it all the time. The itch would emerge without fail when I drank, however. When drunk, I'd pretty much chain smoke as part of the one-two punch with alcohol to drown my feelings away.
At a party, you'd find me out back hanging with the iconoclasts and all the other broken artists who haven't yet learned that the real prison is themselves. I made friends with the bad kids in the smoking hut at a dead end job we all hated, and got through because of each other. I've connected with strangers and relatives over fire, or a lack of it, and found a common ground in the common poison that all the sensible kids don't understand. I've inhaled a socially-acceptable form of self-harm, and liked how it made me feel like I belonged somewhere. I've enjoyed the romance of waking up after a wild night out smelling of cigarettes and alcoholism. I've traded in plenty of my later life for a few cheap moments taken for myself now. When anxious. When bored. When lonely. When overthinking. When? Always, when drinking.
The day my Dad died of cancer I quit smoking real cigarettes, and I haven't had one since – except in nightmares. I moved over to e-cigarettes, then to a vape-rig with its silly, pontificating fumes. A loophole side-shift made perfectly for those drunken nights when the inconsolable urge to self-soothe with an oral fixation came calling. I'd wake up the next day feeling like squirrels had nested in my mouth. Bad squirrels, at that.
Lest we forget, at the height of my alcoholism, I was drinking most evenings, and thus, smoking most evenings. I've huffed my way through a helluva lot of nicotine – and nicotine makes your teeth yellow.
Now that I don't drink, that inconsolable urge...just never happens. Because self-soothing is not the same as self-care, and I only practice the latter these days.
Nowadays I find smoking and vaping to be pretty gross. I walk past the smokers and I'm glad that I've moved on. Now that I've regained my sense of smell fully, the aroma of cigarettes smells like death to me, and hangs around people I work with like a ghost that'll take them too soon.
White > yellow
Alcoholism is ugly.
There were lot of nights where I don't think I cleaned my teeth, and since I can't remember, let's assume not, eh? There were definitely nights where I used alcohol to dull the pain of grief, and EDS3, and the depression I've had for as long as I can remember, to clutch at desperate, fitful sleep in lieu of nightly ablutions.
Plus, there was a lot of vomit during that period of my life, y'know? I got very good at purging excess acid when hungover, or just when my drunken brain knew I'd gone too far, or I wanted a second wind. There's a knack to expulsion that I wish I didn't know like...well, like the back of my hand, funnily enough. All that stomach acid flowing over teeth isn't a good thing for any part of your mouth.
A chemical pardon
Hence, I decided to throw some money at self-care in an attempt to symbolically erase some bad history, and forgo some painful reminders.
There's no way I can afford to straighten my janky teeth, and I'm not sure the technology even exists to do it in my weird-ass case. (Scrabble tiles, I'm tellin' ya.) But I could sure afford to slap 350 euro down to scrub a few shades of sadness from my skull.
So I did, and boy, did it Hurt Like Fuck.
The process
The dental visit itself involved a professional cleaning the day before, during which I enquired about how much the bleaching would hurt, given my sensitive teeth. I was told that no painkillers would be administered during the process, but to take something an hour before my appointment and I'd be fine. They gave me some gel to rub on my teeth and leave on, which would help to prevent sensitivity. Nice.
I followed the instructions to a tee and turned up ready to be wowed by a breeze of a process. Here's what it involved:
1) They put a thoroughly sexy mouth spreader between your lips and teeth, and pack your gums with god knows what.
2) Next, they carefully paint some bleach mixture onto your teeth.
3) They position your chair so you can watch Lightroom tutorials on YouTube, pull a massive rolling light on an arm up to your teeth, and essentially couple it to the face contraption. It blasts your teeth for 15 minutes with light and air.
4) Your teeth get very hot, and start to hurt a bit The air moving over the surface of your enamel stings..
5) BOOP! Time's up! They hoover and clean the old bleach off your teeth, you rinse, and repeat steps 2 and 3.
6) The fun begins. Irregular, eye-watering jolts of electric shock pain start to needle through your teeth surfaces, leaving a light trail in your eyes. You squeeze your eyes closed and try to clench your teeth and live through it. The nurse starts telling you how long the timer has left because she spots you're clenching your nails so hard into your upper arms that you're leaving marks.
7) Repeat step 5 – plus 2 and 3. The pain gets stronger, like someone's taken a scalpel and lopped half your teeth off, and is rooting around in your dentine with a corkscrew soaked in boiling vinegar. Waves of pain come more regularly, with greater intensity, until it's just a long burning flatline of hurt and acid in your consciousness. It feels like your teeth are melting. The nurse reassures you there's only a few minutes left, and then starts counting down the minutes. You tell her you are done just when the machine beeps and turns off. But the pain keeps building, and building, until you can't see right. You start to cry at some point but you don't know when.
8) The staff are now panicking, and ask you on a scale of one to 10 what level you're at. It’s at about 7. The dentist comes in and administers some anaesthetic directly onto the surfaces of your teeth with a cotton bud, which makes your lips numb and slurry, but abates the pain enough that you can mentally form words even if you can’t say them properly.
9) You’re given milk to drink and told that the colour is great. You remember the nurse quite literally wiping tears from your face with a tissue.
10) They tell you not to eat solid food today, and drink lots of milk. You’re reassured that the intensity of the pain you're in isn't normal, and this was totally unexpected, but they're confident it won't hurt tomorrow. Pinkie swear.
11) They give you a sheet telling you to avoid foods that would stain a t-shirt (no beetroot, tomato, or turmeric for you!) and recommend a 'white diet' for the next week or so. The concept of food makes you nauseous.
12) You head out into the cold October air – with instructions to keep your mouth closed to avoid the cold getting at your teeth, and egads, yes, those instructions get followed.
13) You walk to a supermarket to buy lots of milk. Occasionally stopping to clutch your mouth and double up in pain on the sidewalk.
14) Remember it wasn’t supposed to hurt? You go to work because you're an idiot and booked an early appointment. The pain continues in peaks and troughs of dull and acute, for hours. You consume several litres of milk. You pop three different types of industrial-strength painkillers, and it's still excruciating. You try not to speak at all if possible, because opening your mouth hurts. The electric jolts bring tears to your eyes, but eventually subside after two or three hours. This is some consolation, but your mouth feels like your teeth have been removed, and jagged pegs of pain put in their place. Really, really white jagged painpegs, though!
15) You try to do some good work, and somehow manage it. Your incredible right and left-hand-men at work help you to be productive (thanks gents!) but after 6 hours of intense pain you reach your threshold and have to head home. You use up the remaining sensitivity gel, and it does absolutely nothing.
16) You pop a sleeping pill and fall into a restless, dreamless sleep, waking a few hours later with a just-about-bearable level of pain. The concept of food makes you recoil in horror. A picture of a woman holding an apple makes you almost sick. The idea of how much it would hurt to put vomit on your teeth surfaces right now makes you feel doubly unwell. Somehow, you keep it down.
17) You can handle food by the next day, and hard food by that next night. It still hurts for days. Some irregular extra-white spots on your teeth fade to a uniform white. Your teeth are hella sensitive.
18) When you have your follow-up appointment, they say the colour is great, your ongoing sensitivity is not normal, and urge you to use Sensodyne. Your teeth are measurably 6 shades whiter, and have veered into what they jokingly call the 'American white' shades scale.
300) You stumble up the stone-hewn passageway into the blinding sunlight, squinting and clutching the treasure in your hand. You have survived. You entered the castle of the dental warlock, braved the dungeons of the enamel lych, and lived to tell the tale. You go home to your village and live out your days as a hero whose dazzling white smile inspires the hearts of the village children. Well done!
The effects
The process hurt. A lot.
Would I do it again if I went back in time? Hm. Yes? Maybe? I don’t know. It didn’t kill me so I must be stronger. Kelly Clarkson said so.
Will I do it again in my life from this point on? No. No. Nope. Noodly nope.
Will I make sure my teeth stay white instead? Very yes.
Am I reminded of my Dad when I look in the mirror? Not nearly as much.
Do I look at my teeth and smell burning cigarettes? Not any more.
As I have EDS3, I have a different relationship with pain than others do. Sadly, I clearly had an out-of-this-world terrible reaction to the process, that very little could be done about. It's good to know as a cautionary tale for future treatments I may have in my life, and something that no longer hurts now. But wow.
On the upside, my teeth really are rather monumentally white.
Plus, the symbolism that I see in my reflection now makes me feel like I've managed to sandblast some of the sadness soot from In Here.
Regardless of how awful the process was, I'll chalk it up – or should it be 'bleach it up'? – as a win.
(Clean your teeth, kids.)
(Oh, and whenever possible, try not to become an alcoholic.)
Love always,
Fay
xXx