“My teeth hurt, ache. These days chewing peanuts is out of the question. Taking a bite out of an apple would, undoubtedly, leave me toothless. Then there’s this big back tooth here. See it? See? It’s wiggly. Not right at all.”
I confess all of this to my dentist of ten years, Dr. Hussain, who does his best not to laugh but does any way, saying, “Welcome to old age.”
Although I smile, this is not the response I was hoping for.
I am in the chair, the bright yellow light craning down to look at me, and he is behind me, peering into my file, no doubt, and now in front of me, and so I say, “But there’s more: I fall off sidewalks. One minute I am minding my own sidewalk-strolling business, smooth slabs of cement running off into the distance, and the next thing I know, my feet have taken me into the tall grass. How is that possible?”
Dr. Hussain Hussain is the kind of friend I don’t see often; actually, friend is not the right word, more like a necessary acquaintance. But when I do make an appointment, see him, I say the kinds of no-nothing things like, “How have you been” or “It’s been a while”, etc. And of course when a dentist says, “It’s been a while,” I can’t help but feel a tinge of guilt because I know a reprimand when I hear one.
Dr. Hussain says, “Open wide” and I do and then he—40ish with a small brown moustache—asks me something about flossing, but of course I can’t answer because he has one of those thin silver tools stuck in my mouth, holding my tongue back and I am not sure how to answer ‘sometimes’ with my hands. Once he removes the tool, I continue with, “Not only that but I’m biting my lips more these days, and things that once could have waited to be done, no hurry, now cannot wait.” And again, as if one sentence fits all, Dr. Hussain says, “Welcome to old age”.
Then he says, “Just a moment,” as he turns to look at my chart again, holding it up to the blaring light: x-rays of my teeth, the stuff of skeleton.
His assistant is a new young woman who I don’t remember seeing before. Her nametag says BEKIE, and I can only imagine it’s a typo. And of course when she smiles her teeth are like an advertisement: straight, white, a healthy sparkle. And she says good morning even though it is well after lunch time. Now that she has shown me her teeth, she slips on her mask. Come to think of it, she may not be new at all since I have been away for so long. When she steps out of the room, I want to ask him a question about her but when no particular question comes to mind I return to squinting up into the too-bright light.
“But, you know what?”
“What’s that?” BEKIE, who has returned, chirps.
“The hair on my head is slowly but surely disappearing; I see it, feel it happening daily, a slow but steady process. And by the way, where’s all this whispering and mumbling coming from? I laugh at jokes I cannot hear. I say yes to things I am not sure about, yet, saying yes is easier than saying What?’”
When Dr. Hussain returns to lean into my mouth, I am given a good long look at the neatly-clipped brown hairs of his moustache through his window-like mask, the sugary smell of his cologne. But before he can begin his probing again, I say, “Listen to this. Ready?”
“Surely,” he says unenthusiastically.
“Ok, from my front door to the corner mailbox is 43 footsteps. Right? Forty-three. Always has been, always will be. But get this, coming back from the mailbox to my front door is 41 steps. Now you tell me, how is that possible?” Forty-three going, forty-one returning. Beyond the laws of physics, I’d say.”
To this he says nothing and when BEKIE whispers something to him, he nods. None of this I like. But now that I have him out of my mouth, I cannot help myself but continue.
“Not only that but one eye is better than the other, so getting good looks these days means turning sideways. Truth be told, same with the hearing, one ear is less broken than the other.”
With one last unfriendly probe that leaves me wide-eyed, he unleans from my mouth, saying, “Ok, you’ll need a crown on that upper molar. A crown should do the trick.” His declaration finished, he steps to the sink to wash his hands, even though in a dentist’s office it is probably not called a sink but something more clinical, anything but sink.
I make another appointment for next Tuesday, and as I leave, groaning as I pull myself out of his chair, the light taking up at spot on the chair, BEKIE, mask off now, says, “Bye-bye.” On the other hand, he says nothing because being a busy dentist he doesn’t have time to say good-bye.
To review: teeth hurt, falling off sidewalks, having to lean to the right to see, to hear, etc. and all the while I have a dentist whose wisdom stops at ‘Welcome to old age’. There you have it. I leave checking my watch, and from the moment I walked in until the moment I walked out, it took exactly fifteen, . . . no sixteen minutes. And for some reason, sixteen minutes feels just about right.
Photo by Atikah Akhtar on Unsplash.
