A dental dynasty

The human body should come with an owner’s manual.

A useful entry in such a manual might read: “Warning! If your mom buys a lug of plums for canning, DO NOT consume more than two plums at a time, no matter how sweet and delicious they are! Failure to heed this warning – for instance, eating 10 plums – will result in the type of digestive disturbances that are associated with rocket engines.”

Imagine how much distress one could avoid with an owner’s manual. The manual would inform you that it’s a bad idea to jump off the porch roof while attempting to use an umbrella as a parachute. A person would know better than to stick a finger into a light socket before making absolutely certain that its switch is in the “off” position.

An owner’s manual would be a fount of useful information. One section that I would pay much more attention to would be the chapter that deals with oral hygiene.

I don’t just mean getting your mouth washed out with soap after saying a naughty word. I’m talking about the kind that involves brushing, flossing, and visiting your dentist regularly, which, in my case, means about once per decade.

Like many, I brush my teeth every day whether they need it or not. The part where I fell down was visiting my dentist whether I needed to or not.

My dental appointments have always been brought about by dental pain. As such, I have learned to associate dentists with Novocain needles and the supersonic squeal of a drill.

Even though I am an experienced dental patient – my oral X-rays light up like a Christmas tree – I still have most of my original choppers. I would have had four more were it not for the painfully impacted wisdom teeth that were extracted when I was in my early 20s.

“Extracted” is a clean, clinical term for what amounted to a wrestling match between my dentist and my stubborn wisdom teeth, two of which had roots that resembled a fishhook. I wish I had saved those teeth; they would have looked cool on a necklace.

I recently decided to avoid waiting until something hurts by scheduling a preemptive dental appointment. It had been so long since I had seen my dentist that he had retired. His practice was taken over by his son. My hope was that patronizing this dental dynasty might mean that some sympathy for me had been transferred genetically.

A young dental assistant named Madison irradiated my choppers with a beam of high-energy X-rays. The resulting images were immediately displayed on a computer screen.

“That’s pretty slick,” I said. “I remember how they used to sprint the film off to a lab for developing. Thank goodness for the Pony Express or it would have taken a lot longer!”

Madison inspected my maw with her special dental mirror. “How long has it been since you’ve had your teeth cleaned?” she asked.

“I gave them a good scrubbing this morning.”

“No, I mean cleaned by a dentist.”

“I don’t know, but it’s been a long time. What century is this?”

Madison stuck her head into the hallway and said to the office staff, “Block out the next hour. This is going to take a while.”

Doctors are forever warning us about doing stupid stuff such as using a cotton swab to clean your ears. “Never put anything in your ear that’s smaller than your elbow,” they admonish. Yet, I once watched as a farmer cleaned his auditory canal with the rounded end of a cotter pin. It goes without saying that he was a bachelor.

We’re also told not to put anything metal into our mouths. But what did Madison do? Yep. She went after my choppers with a humungous iron hook!

The instrument probably wasn’t all that big. Such things probably just seem much larger when they involve your personal teeth.

As Madison worked, my teeth telegraphed a high-pitched whine similar to that of a drill. The fine mist that would occasionally erupt from my beak was elegantly backlit by Madison’s headlamp.

“This tool uses pulses of high-pressure water to clean teeth,” Madison explained when I asked about it during a pause in the action. This essentially meant that Madison was power washing my tusks.

We have a power washer at home that I use to scour grime off the deck and degrease my tractor. Maybe I could use it to perform some preemptive dental care.

That probably wouldn’t work; the power washer’s wand is longer than my arm. And I doubt if anything like that would be recommended by the owner’s manual. 

Jerry’s book, "Dear County Agent Guy," is available at http://Workman.com and in bookstores nationwide.