A Tooth Teaches
/They called me a wisdom tooth. I was cracked by an anaesthetist’s tool that knocked me while my host was asleep. One day a few weeks later I broke, a big piece of me passing harmlessly down her throat. It was almost painless. She wondered if she had misplaced some of her wisdom.
I was one of three surviving wisdom teeth. A wayward one, growing in the wrong direction, was sawed into pieces many years ago by the dentist who picked it out. He needed a leg up on the side of the chair to lever out the roots. He removed quite a lot of her bone, too. They refused any kind of sedative. They didn’t keep those drugs at the clinic ‘because so many Aboriginal patients are drug seekers,’ he told her. It was an intense experience. She was twenty-four years old and already a mother. She felt disrespected and poorly treated. She became more cautious of dentists.
I gave no trouble for thirty years. In some ways I was helpful. But things changed. After the break, the remaining part of me was sharp, cutting. Exposure of the big nerve came in the following weeks. Starting as unpleasant twinges, the pain then took on a life of its own.
Mount Denali in Alaska. The brown mountain in the middle distance is called ‘Broken Tooth’. Pic by Paxson Woelber.
She felt in miserable communion, then, with all of her patients afflicted by toothache. She understood why they knocked on her door at night or woke up the nurses. She developed insight into how it was that they didn’t get to the dentist. ‘You have to go to the dentist for that tooth,’ she and the nurses would say to the patient, who’d hold their cheek and nod. And roll their eyes.
Her patients at the last place had to travel 600km, over sandy ridges and holes that approximated a road, to get to the dentist. And they had no money in a whole different world of a way.
In a collision of mismanagement and misunderstanding, she had not been paid as planned. I heard her say she had no money for a dentist. So her own humbling experience was prolonged.
My host was physically closer to dentists, but until she had some money they could have been just as far away. She found a little solace in knowing that she’d been kind to her clients, if not always patient herself, finding the clove oil, counting out the paracetamol with codeine. She didn’t care what people said about it. ‘Sometimes codeine is the perfect drug,’ she thought.
She went to a doctor who gave her a note to get codeine, so that I, the broken tooth with my horrible exposed nerve, could go to sleep at night. There’s no dentist to help you, the doctor said. ‘You are not yet poor enough for the one local dentist who does charity work.’
The doctor put her on large doses of antibiotics. She thought of all the places she’s been that people can’t get them, swallowed them gratefully. The storm around my pulp settled.
There’s this idea of heat in the body in the old medical systems. The newer one calls it inflammation. She knows from the old ways—Aboriginal, Chinese—that some foods can make heat in the head worse. I show her vividly. Lamb, kangaroo, prawns, ginger. Coffee, chilli. So many things she liked made me worse.
Strawberry chilli chocolate. You can get a toothache just looking at it. Pic by Tiia Monto.
Even brushing gently near me at night sent lances of scorching pain shooting along her jaw. She groaned. Every time. Over-working, getting stressed, inadequate rest all aggravated me. I strove to teach her the middle way. She’s middle-aged now. ‘It’s time for moderation. I am the enforcer.’
She started getting short-tempered at work. And at home. Her direct, abrupt manner began to dominate. My slow, painful death was changing her personality. People didn’t see me there, cutting her tongue, making her words sharper. She saw that her sweetness and kindness were fruits of the generosity she normally feels from the world, the ease she normally has in her body. She brought out her better qualities for fleeting moments, smiled at the patients. The medicine helped. But she had started to scowl at herself in the mirror.
The salve of comfort eating was denied her, of course. This went on for weeks. She understood why children with little teeth liked eating chicken nuggets. She sadly imagined what it was like for old people who have few teeth and eat their apples stewed. She bought a kilo of green apples and stewed them, sucking them off a spoon with cinnamon for breakfast each day.
She got sick—caught a virus from one of her patients. And was reminded again how people get worn down, run down, exhausted. At least she was loved, she knew. Her wife gave her hugs, made nourishing food. Their friends and family made sure they were alright. She maintained her resilience.
But she had to beg her bosses to pay her sooner. It couldn’t be ‘within thirty days.’ ‘Not all doctors are rich,’ she thought. ‘Not many bush doctors can treat their wages as if they’re pocket money or a bonus. Sometimes a health worker needs to go to the dentist.’
It took the benevolent efforts of an agent, several managers and admin workers to pull money out of the automated system for her earlier than usual. Like pulling a tooth, she thought. Pain along each jaw, up into her ear, pushed her to push them. Disease bred desperation.
Sometimes the pain was bad enough that getting her head cut off sounded appealing. Her wife took over the driving, encouraged her to take the pain meds. She suffered the side-effects of the codeine and didn’t love it anymore.
Finally, she was paid. ‘There’s an appointment with the dentist at the end of the week’, the receptionist says, ‘or you can drive an hour to get to an appointment on Monday.’ She took an appointment in a week. Her wife said, ‘So you’re not suffering enough?’ My host called the receptionist back, took the Monday appointment.
The dentist was young, friendly and sturdy. ‘My tooth fairy,’ she smiled to herself. She noticed his muscular arms. ‘At least he’ll be strong enough.’ She told him about her previous experience.
‘Get me the cow horns,’ he said. Photo by Ernst Vikne.
‘There’ll be no leg on the chair, ‘ he said. ‘But doing root canal work to try to save this tooth would be difficult and expensive,’ he explained. ‘It would take several visits. It would be a bad thing if you are out in the desert and something goes wrong with this tooth between visits. And it would only be a temporary solution.’
‘Take it away,’ she said. ‘Take it out.’
The dentist was lavish with the needles and she appreciated it. He took his time to push and pull me away from the body that created me. He needed a special tool, he told the assistant. ‘Get me the cow horns.’
I felt her relief that she couldn’t see the cow horns, only felt the pressure of them, metal around bone and enamel, her cheek stretched, stinging. On the ceiling of the dental surgery, there was the luxury of a television, with pictures of jellyfish: comb jellies, irukandji, blue bottles. The poisonous, pretty things were distracting. She imagined her gum as an opening flower, saw the jellyfish fanning through the water; wondered about the power source of the iridescence they generate.
Moon jellyfish in the Audubon Aquarium of the America, photo Nickabattista.
‘There we go,’ the dentist says. Lifted out of my bloody matrix, I clattered on a metal tray. She could see how strong I was and how badly broken. I was wrapped in soft paper and plastic. I felt them, made from trees and the thousand-years rotted remains of living things. I sat there for a while before my consumption by a very hot fire.
My ashes are part of the earth now, from which I was made.
She wonders whether her wisdom was rotten so many years. She wonders when it was broken. From ashes in the earth I send the message: there is meaning in learning. Healing is still possible. I think she heard.
Thumbnail shows Amauri Acosta Montiel working in social service at a Mexican University.
