Toothless

Last night I watched the film “Pursuit of Happiness”.  I’d heard that it was a bit of a tearjerker – that it had emotional clout.  I generally avoid emotionally loaded films.  I prefer fight scenes and explosions and high speed chases.  Things that don’t require that I care.  But I’d also heard it was a good movie.  And good movies are something I can appreciate – especially when the quality comes from good writing and good acting and a certain amount of fidelity to the state of humanity.  The film delivered.  But it didn’t jerk any tears.  Because it represented something I understand far too well.

The main character in the movie does not seem able to get a decent break.  He spends most of the film teetering so close to the edge that the slightest breeze will send him over.  And that it doesn’t is something of a testament to his tenacity, but also a bit of simple luck.  Not destiny.  Not divinity.  Dumb luck.

I can identify.  It seems that no matter how hard I work or how much effort I put out, I’m still teetering on the edge.  Last week I found out that the $3k in dental work I had done back in 2008 was done so poorly that I now need to have those teeth pulled.  I am faced with choosing between spending $4k for a set of bridges that I already know will break, or spending $9k to get implants that may actually last.  May being the operative term.

I’ve had the surgery on my wrist twice.  I’ve had my crowns all replaced – none of them have lasted more than 5 years.  I’ve replaced all of my fillings at least once.  No injury actually heals.  It goes into remission.  My ankle?  Remission.  Ready to re-awaken the moment I think I might actually want to run again.  My heel?  I have plantar fasciaitis.  God how mundane.  And stupidly painful.  And it will be another thing that goes in and out of focus.

I do not have the money for this dental work.  I do not foresee a time when I will have the money.  My student loans are coming due.  I already live in the ghetto.  I will admit that I spent some money recently.  I bought a new coat.  I got a gym membership.  I changed the oil in my car.  And most terrifying, I already had a root canal and a crown done.  Because the filling broke, and I didn’t have insurance and I couldn’t afford to have it fixed when it just would have been a filling.

When Mitt Romney said his shit about the very poor having a safety net… I thought I would be ill.  There is no safety.  There is no net.  There are just numbers on a budget sheet – a piddly sum that can only help one out of a thousand qualified needy.  The rest of us?  We lose our teeth.

I have dental insurance now.  It will not cover the implant.  Or the bone graft necessary to make it happen.  And I cannot currently afford the implant.  I might be able to pay for the bone graft though.  But not the bone graft and the bridge.  I have to choose.  Do I want an implant someday?  Do I want a bridge that I will break in five years?  Does it matter to me if I have teeth?  What if it takes me four or five years to save enough money?  Is it worth it to have two teeth missing for five years?

I hadn’t planned on having to pay for my wrist surgery twice.  That is the catch.  Funny how something that was so critical in May of 2011 can have such resounding impacts on decisions in February of 2012.  I don’t know what I could have done differently.  Maybe not gone to Italy.  Or maybe I shouldn’t have taken the job I have now.  The job that is so close to being right and yet so very wrong at exactly the same time.  Pointless to consider I guess.

I have decided what I will do.  I decided on the way home for the dentist, when I surprised myself by crying on the freeway.  I’d thought I was immune to these sorts of twist of fate.  I’ve accepted that things just go wrong.  I really have.  I do not expect things to go right.  My friends tell me that this just means that things absolutely will go wrong, but they misunderstand.  I have no control over the quality of the seal on the crowns that the sham dentist put in.  I knew they were poorly done, but I didn’t have the money to have them re-done.  As it is, I have no control over the majority of things that go wrong in my life.  These things aren’t the result of some sort of wantonness or short sighted desire for pleasure regardless of consequences.  Most of them are beyond my control – the results of other people’s actions or the workings of time or the results of extended poverty.  They are things that just happen.  I do my best to let it roll off my back, to not allow myself to be subsumed by the almost constant barrage of “bad luck”, but seriously, it is comical the way things happen around here.  There is a crazy screen-plan in this.  Though I wonder if it has a happy ending.

I’ve decided to do the bone grafts.  And I’ll leave the spaces empty.  That means I’ll be short two molars – indefinitely.  Maybe someday I’ll be able to afford the implants.  Maybe I’ll learn not to care.  Maybe I’ll lose weight and missing two key teeth will be the best diet ever.  Or maybe I’ll get in another car wreck and it will all be moot.  Who the hell knows.  But I will not go into debt for my teeth.  Not while I’m still in debt for my education.  Not while my job title still says “assistant”.  Not while I’m still living a fucking joke of a life.  It’s not worth it.  And this is something that needs to be worth it.  I need to be worth it.  And right now?  I’m not worth $9k.  Not to me.

The more I talk to other people, the more I understand that my existence resides in the tail end of the bell curve.  I’m off the map.  A social and cultural outlier, though not necessarily in a good way.  Not a genius or a savant or really talented in any way, unless misfortune is a kind of talent.  And there I go feeling sorry for myself.  Again.  Pity is such a waste.  Particularly self-pity.

I wonder what it will feel like to have missing teeth.  I’m also playing with the idea of having the first extraction done with local anesthetic only.  It’s cheaper.  Except, I’ve never actually had a local anesthetic really work.  I always feel something – usually quite a lot.  I have a mantra that gets me through drilling and root canals (this too shall pass – nothing lasts forever – on a long enough time line…).  But maybe feeling my tooth being pulled (or chipped out, as it is a molar) will be cathartic.  Maybe it will satisfy my self-destructive urges for a while.  Or maybe it will give me a mother of a headache.  Maybe I should just pay the extra for a nice shot of laughing gas.  At least then I’d have a wee bit of euphoria for my pain.

I’ll think on it.  And tomorrow I’ll schedule the first extraction.  Might as well get on with it.  Before something else happens.