Tales of the 10th West Irregulars: May 2018

I am writing this from the before place. Writing this from the in-between. Writing this from the road to recovery.

When I started this Blog I gave myself permission, to be honest- but space to choose my honesty. Choose what is public and what is private. Most often the voice I capture here is my mom voice. Soft white with ribbons of blue, I speak of our children. Sometimes you might catch strings of my underlining sadness or the loose threads of my fears.

This is not that. This is all me. The red brick walls at the center of who I am. The bricks that hold all the other pieces of me together.

For a long time, I have encased a secret. Probably at times not so secret- my teeth were in bad shape. Almost all of my back teeth were chipped or cracking. They needed crowns and new fillings. A few needed more than crowns.

I lived like that for a long time, more than a decade, maybe 2. I have carried this weight with me a long way. I even remember a horrifying moment while reading my sister's autopsy. It was noted her teeth were in good condition. It was shocking that all I could think was, how is that possible? Her teeth are fine and mine are messed up?!

Each year they slowly got worse. Each year the pain harder to manage. The secret bigger and bigger. It became part of my life every waking minute. It was always there haunting me, pressing in with worry, pain, and shame. But I refused to deal with it in any other way than to hide and cover. As long as my front teeth remained healthy enough to hide the true state of my mouth I was going to keep going.

The state of my teeth wasn't from bad oral hygiene. In fact, I had to be hyper-vigilant because of the pain. My issue stemmed from several places: grinding my teeth, a bad blow to the head, and the biggest, my refusal to go to the dentist to get minor repairs and cleanings done. Like a lot of people I deeply fear the dentist.

I have a good reason- I can't get or stay numb.

Lots of people experience this. My case is extreme! Skipping ahead, my dentist told us he has never in his whole career had to push so much medication on one person. He was apologizing over and over for not being able to get and keep me numb. That was even while using (and including a failure of) conscious sedation.

Valid fear aside, I also suffer from anxiety. I have an issue with giving up control. Part of why so many people fear the dentist is it goes against all of our animal instincts to lay down on our backs and let a stranger get right up in your face. It's aggressive and it's unnatural. It's nearly impossible for me.

For years BC stood back and watched me struggle. By December, it was clear I was losing my war. I was shutting down in a thousand ways. It was getting dangerous. One night out of the blue he asked me, "Are you ready to go see a dentist." I surprised us both by answering yes.

I cried all the way through the first visit. BC was with me. He had to do all the talking. I even refused at first to know any of the details of the complex dental plan. I wanted no information about what was about to happen. I needed to give up all control to be able to go forward. Like repelling off a cliff I had to lean back over the edge trusting the rope to hold me... and BC did.

We made the first appointment for the end of March, after State Meet. I had a long time to get ready. I remember counting down the events and days as it got closer. I tried to prepare. I shopped for my special soft food diet. I put pain medicine and a paper to keep track of them on a high shelf, knowing I wouldn't want to bend over afterward. I put ice packs in the freezer. I scheduled time off from work and found drivers for Beach.

I remember standing in the shower the night before letting the water run down my body, you are the patient, you don't have to do anything, it's all his job, you are the patient, ..... I was trying to surrendering ever ounce of control I had left. If I felt like I had any control I knew I wouldn't go.

The first appointment (deconstruction) was disastrous and successful. The medicine meant to sedate me didn't work. With the help of my anxiety, I was able to fight the effects of it and was aware and remembered the whole 5 plus hour procedure. My dentist was having to stop and give me shots every 20 minutes just to get through. By the end, the shots no longer worked at all.

It took me a week to recover, 2 weeks to feel normal, 3 weeks to be healed enough to use a straw. One unexpected side effect is that although this is embarrassing to me, with no outward changes to the state of my mouth I was instantly no longer ashamed.

A month later I went back for the next step. It was a minor procedure. This time the sedation medicine, a different rx, worked much better. Coupled with nitrous oxide I was much less aware. My dentist also changed the medication used for numbing to something known to last an uncomfortably long time. He skipped the little nerves too; he went straight for the "big" one. It felt like the shot was rupturing my ear drum but he only had to do it one time (on each side) in the 2-hour visit.

We believe it was a dry run for how he will handle the next big appointment. And yet alarmingly the numbness was totally gone by the time I was home.

I slept the rest of the day and what memories I had of the procedure closed like a book. I was at work the next day feeling medium well.

Then I began to get curious. I called the dentist with a list of questions. The answers were not all wonderful. The process was going to be a lot longer than I thought it would take. The appointments more spread out because I was healing slowly. I can't be too disappointed, I was never planning to have this done in the first place. I should be overjoyed. I am not. I am assuming I will get there. Vanity will kick in at some point but right now it feels more like survival than anything else.

So this is the in-between, the middle of May. I am surprised I am willing to write this now. I planned on writing about it when it was all safely behind me. When if someone peeked inside my mouth all they would see is beautiful, whole teeth. But there is something happening I didn't plan on. Staring down my anxiety for such a long time changes how I am seeing it. It changes how big I am willing to let it be in my life. How much I will allow it to cover.

I don't consider getting my teeth fixed a victory over anxiety. For me, it was the better of 2 bad ideas. A choice I didn't really have. I leaned on BC to make it happen.

However, I did believe to do this, even passively, I would have to go through all the old baggage I carry around (especial those related to my mouth) but I was wrong. At my lowest point, it was like ducking under a fence. Knees to the ground, crawling, and all those stones my anxiety, my guilt over my sister's death, and the weight of my past had slipped into my pockets, they spilled out onto the ground. I simply stood up, brushed myself off, and weightlessly walked away from them.

Here in the in-between I can hear the hunger in my head and see all the false fixes filling in the cracks around my red bricks. I can see a long way down the walls in both directions. I now know how people get into places they can't get out of. And once again I know why I picked BC to be my partner.

I still have a few temporary crowns on so I am mostly adhering to a soft food diet- no apples, no carrots, no crackers or chips. It's not so fun or as weight loss friendly as one would first think. Anything creamy is in, anything crunchy is out.

I have 2 more appointments pending. The first of the last is scheduled for the end of May. It will be a bad one. I will somehow have to return to a point of being able to surrender. The irony is I feel so much stronger now it will be harder to do. At times I am not sure I can, even though I know I will have to. Then from there, I will go all summer in limbo; the last appointment sometime in August. It should be a breeze, so I am told.

I look out over a summer of recovery. It's not what I thought summer 45 would be. But it is a summer I will have to walk one way or another. It is up to me how I go about it. On the other side is the person I will be going forward. From here she looks a lot like someone I used to know- she looks a lot like me.