Adventures In Home Dentistry

Last night, with the assistance of a pair of needle-nosed pliers, dental floss, and some cheap whiskey, I self-extracted a tooth.

Don't try this at home folks.  I'm a professional geologist, and now that I say that out loud, I realize that gives me absolutely no qualifications for what I did.  I thought about not posting this at all for fear that someone else might take it as encouragement or use it for on-line instruction, and also because this is intensely personal, but this is real life, folks, and yesterday felt about as real as it gets.  

Self-extracting an adult tooth is one of those irreversible, no-looking-back moments, like a tattoo, or better yet a facial tattoo.  The tooth ain't coming back, and what's done can't be undone, at least  in this lifetime.

Some background:  I've got fucked-up teeth.  Always have and always will.  I'm used to it, I've learned to live with it, and I'm comfortable with who I am, short-comings and all.  But one of those pearly-white, perfectly aligned smiles?  That's not us, kiddo.  In fact, I consider it a kind of badge of honor or street-cred authenticity - the man behind that imperfect smile obviously didn't grow up wealthy and didn't lead a life of  privilege.  My smile bonds me to the common folk far from the top 1% of wealth and indicates that whatever I've earned and achieved, I've earned and achieved on my own - mine isn't the toothy shark-smile of a trust-fund baby.

Nevertheless, I have gotten my two front teeth capped over a decade ago, and that's helped my appearance a lot.  But my lower front teeth have always been too crowded and misaligned. What's more, because they are so crowded and misaligned, it's nearly impossible to brush all the random surfaces between the tight crevices, so they're often discolored and look like a bunch of randomly oriented candy corns in my mouth,  Fortunately for me, I also have, among other problems, an overbite, so most people don't even notice my lower teeth.  

Funny story - I was at a wedding a few years ago and a precocious little preschool girl, the daughter of someone in the wedding party, was talking to me and did notice my lower teeth.  She asked me to see them (she was too young to know her proper manners) and when I complied and pulled down my lower lip, she screamed and ran to her mother.  

So, with that as background, about a month ago I was out eating lunch and suddenly experienced a sharp, shooting pain in my lower mouth.  I wasn't sure what had just happened and I thought to myself "I think I just bit my teeth." When I got to a bathroom mirror, I saw that one of the lower front teeth had somehow got pushed out of the misaligned row in my mouth and was now standing alone in a second row behind the first.  Worse, it was also loose and wobbly back there by itself.

This was far worse than the appearance I'd come to know and accept.  It made me very self-conscious and undermined my confidence.  Worse, the loose tooth was sensitive to pressure and I had to chew around it, but since it was in the front, it was hard to bite into anything hard (e.g., apples) or that required tearing, like the meat in a sandwich.  With time, it just got looser and more sensitive and eating solid food got harder by the day.

So, you're wondering, why didn't I just go to the dentist?  That's a very good question and I wish I had a good answer for you.  I was busy - a scheduled trip to Iowa, several imminent deadlines at work, but we both know that's no alibi.  For some reason, I had subconsciously decided to endure it (I was going to say "grin and bare it," but as a matter of fact, I was trying not to grin or frighten more small children by baring it).

However, late last week, it got to the point of unbearableness.  Friday, while out eating the softest chopped pork barbeque and Brunswick stew I could find, I decided I was going to take matters into my own hands and extract the tooth myself over the weekend.

Early Saturday afternoon, before the Georgia Bulldogs football game started (I didn't want to miss that - the tooth was a problem, but I had my priorities), I took a pair of unsanitized needle-nosed pliers out from the tool kit and tried to figure how to go about it.  As I looked in the bathroom mirror trying to adjust the right angle to use, a moment of clarity suddenly emerged, and I thought that if there were a wife or friend or significant other present, they would be yelling at me to stop what I was doing that very moment and would be calling a dentist for me.  This is madness, I realized, and picked up my cell phone to make an appointment with the dentist.

The receptionist sounded quite concerned when I explained the situation (the loose tooth situation, not my impulse to self-extract -  I didn't tell her that part).  She told me that the dentist was not in Saturday afternoons, but that a painful, loose adult tooth was an emergency that needed immediate attention.  She had several backup dentists on call for just this kind of situation, and one of them would be calling me back. "The average response time is about 20 minutes," she advised me.

You probably won't be surprised that after 20 minutes, no one called me back.  No one called within an hour, or before the start of the Bulldogs game (they won!), or before 5:00 p.m. No one called at all.  

At that point, it was back to Plan A - self extraction.  I wasn't going to wait around until I got a call, or until Monday when the real dentist was back in the office.  Using some dental floss to tie off the tooth (the needle nose pliers couldn't keep a firm grip on the wet tooth, and I didn't want to squeeze too hard and shatter the tooth in place) and the pliers to pull, and some cheap Canadian whiskey as an anesthetic and for courage, I pulled once, I pulled twice, and, determined, I managed to get the tooth out on the eighth or ninth tug.

Your moment of Zen - while I was pulling on the tooth, my mind was clear and focussed and not thinking of other things.  Mindfulness by self-surgery.  I was there in the moment, that here-and-now then and there, without distraction or delusion.   

Immediately, I felt better.  Other than a brief nano-second of shock, I felt no pain and my mouth and tongue were immediately relieved not to have the errant tooth sticking out of line.  I soaked my mouth in Listerine for like an hour as a disinfectant, and then relied on the alcohol in the whiskey after that.  Curiously and reassuringly, there was almost no blood.      

What's more, the teeth now look better that they did before.  With one less tooth in the jumble, the lower teeth aren't as crowded.  Sure, I can probably still frighten little girls, but now the surfaces are more accessible to toothbrushes and floss, and my smile is now slightly less Appalachian, slightly less "white trash" than before.  There's no soreness or pain today, and no indication of infection or other malady at the extraction site.

Yes, I will go to the dentist to take a look at things once I can set up a normal, non-emergency appointment.  But no, I don't regret my self-extraction procedure, other than I realized that I needn't have waited so long. 

If you're thinking of pulling a tooth, my advice is don't do it - go to a dentist if you can at all afford it and let a professional do the job.   But if you can't afford it or your mind is already made up, then all I can say is don't be afraid, you can probably do this, and don't forget to use some Listerine.

Be sure to come back for the next installment of this series, titled Adventures in Appendectomies, followed by Trepanation for Fun and Profit.