Even the Mona Lisa


Wherein our narrator suffers an unsightly, if painless, dental crisis.

I didn't notice until after I finished brushing my teeth. I was blissfully using my Sonicare toothbrush, massaging my gums at near microwave frequencies (or so it sometimes seems), just before yoga, as I do every morning. Put the toothbrush down, rinsed my mouth, and, as is normal, then tongued the back of my teeth, so I could enjoy that fresh-just-brushed feeling. That's when I noticed half my tooth was gone.

Now I should be clear: it wasn't really tooth, and hadn't been for over a decade. In April 1993, while doing a ride across the Golden Gate Bridge, the front tire of my bicycle did a quick release (I guess I hadn't attached it firmly enough when I reassembled it on the prior weekend) and I went ass-over-teakettle, or rather, head over handlebars, and did a face plant into the pavement of the bridge's pedestrian walkway.

That does rank as the single most painful moment of my life, and still makes me wince when I think about it. Fortunately I was wearing a helmet (or you might not be reading this blog) so my head (which really didn't hit) was spared damage. I landed on my face, and broke two of my teeth, my front upper right, and the tooth to the right of that. The front upper right was broken close to the bottom, but most of the exposed portion of the other tooth had broken away.

I went to the UCSF dental hospital, where they hastily patched me up with temporary filings, and bid me come back tomorrow. During that next visit I discovered the joys of dental bonding - just then coming into common use - where various nanomaterials were used to create new tooth - literally bonding to the tooth surface. When the work was completed, you could barely tell there'd been any problem. Building up an entire tooth - as they did - wasn't absolutely guaranteed to work. But it did!

At least, it did for 10 and a half years. That's the tooth (or rather, the bond) which fell into my bathroom sink sometime while I was brushing it this morning.

The only complicating factor here is that I'm 8000 miles from my dentist in Santa Monica. And because this is Australia, which has a public health system not unlike Great Britain's or Canada's, I will need to go see a "private" dentist, because I am not covered by Medicare, the national health plan. That's a shame, because I'm directly next door to the Sydney Dental Hospital, which would fix me up in a jiffy if I were covered by Medicare. (I know. I checked this morning.)

So I'm going to ask a few people if they have a private dentist they like, and get some recommendations; we'll see what can be done. It is funny, really, because it doesn't hurt (I think the root of that tooth may be dead, though no one knows) but my smile has acquired a rather fractured appearance. Yipes! And I'll get another bond, because even if it has to be replaced every decade until I'm six feet under, that won't mean many more crises.

It reminds me of nothing so much as one of my favorite scenes from Fight Club: "Jack" (Ed Norton) pulls out his own tooth (while brushing his teeth) and drops it down the drain. To which, Tyler Durden replies, "Hey, even the Mona Lisa is falling apart."

I guess he's right.

Posted: Fri - October 24, 2003 at 10:16 AM        

©