By Jennifer Rae Atkins
It's January 8, 2002, and I'm making the 15-minute walk to my dentist's office. I've seen this dentist only once before, when I had my teeth cleaned a couple of weeks before Christmas. I went to that appointment knowing she'd probably recommend that I get my two remaining wisdom teeth pulled; that's what my old dentist said last time I saw him, three years ago--in fact, that's what he said when I got the first two pulled, seven years ago.
Now my right top wisdom tooth scrapes against the skin of my cheek, and I can't seem to stop compulsively moving my jaw back and forth just to feel the abrasion. So I'm resigned to getting the extraction.
It's a nice day, and I take Broadway to Kearny and then start down toward Dr. Wong's office on the border of Chinatown and the Financial District. I picked her randomly from my insurance company's website because she was the closest woman dentist to my apartment, and I thought I might like having a woman dentist. I was concerned when I saw the peeling paint on her window and her very homely waiting room, but she had lots of up-to-date magazines, she played oldies radio in the examination room, she cleaned my teeth herself (no hygienist), and she was pretty nice.
Only problem was that she usually doesn't pull wisdom teeth. She looked at the X-rays of my mouth and showed me how both of the teeth in question seemed to have conical roots with the tapered ends pointing up into the gums; a cinch to pull, they should just slip right out. She said that even though she doesn't normally do this, since my teeth weren't impacted at all and it seemed like a piece of cake, she'd pull them for me so I could save a little money. She said that if we had a problem, she'd just zip me down to the oral surgeon.
When I tell my boyfriend this, he's alarmed. "Oh no. You can't do that. You need someone who knows what they're doing!"
Out of sheer laziness and the desire to just get it over with, I decide to stick with Dr. Wong.
I get to the dentist's office, give the receptionist my insurance card, and sit down. I don't even have time to read about Julia Roberts's new (married) boyfriend before Dr. Wong is calling me back to the room. I go in and sit in the chair, and to my dismay she's playing staticky KOIT "light rock, less talk" instead of KFRC "good times, great oldies."
"Holding Back the Years" by Simply Red is playing as she starts giving me the Novocaine shots, and Celine Dion is coming up next.
"This will pinch a little," she says. It doesn't really, not too much. We wait a couple of minutes and she starts poking at my gums and teeth to see if I'm numb enough. "No sense for you to feel pain," she says, and I agree, and in fact it does hurt a little, so I get another shot.
When she starts poking around again, I think she's still testing, but soon realize she's started to try to take the tooth out. I can still feel it, so I get a third shot. Now the right side of my mouth is so numb I have trouble rinsing my mouth when she tells me to. It feels like she's stuck a lump of chewing gum on the right side of my palate, but I can tell she really hasn't.
She's pulling and tugging on my mouth. She's holding back my cheek with her hand and yanking on my tooth with some tool. All I can do is lie there and look at that dentist's office vista: half of her head, maybe part of her hand, and the light shining in my face. She considerately asks me several times how I'm doing, and I'm doing okay.
But the tooth doesn't seem to be moving. Not to me, anyway. About ten minutes into it, she's still twisting and pulling, saying "I just have to be patient." I think about saying, "Hey, never mind, let's just leave them there," but it seems to be too late. "It wants to be teased," Dr. Wong says.
To reassure me, she tells me, "I've pulled four teeth on children and I've pulled four teeth on adults." I have no idea if she's telling me she's pulled eight teeth total in her life or trying to say that getting just two teeth pulled isn't a big deal because some people have to have more done.
Dr. Wong has two tools. One is called an elevator, and that's the one I like, the one that feels less uncomfortable. I ask what it is and she says, "It's this one, see?" and sort of holds it up for me, but I can't see anything but the handle. The other tool is more like a pair of pliers, and it does not feel good.
After twenty minutes, the tooth suddenly comes out. Dr. Wong is flabbergasted.
"Holy smokes! Oh, my god. I wasn't expecting this." She gushes over the tooth and leans over my chest to show it to me. She stares at it for a couple of minutes, amazed. It turns out to have three long, gnarled roots, with little hooks on the ends. It's huge. "This is why I swear I won't pull wisdom teeth," Dr. Wong says. "I'm not sure I should do the other one. Let me take a minute to think about this. Holy smokes."
The experience hasn't been too bad, and I sure don't want to have to go through this again on a different day. I encourage her to pull the other one; I tell her she did a great job this time. She tells me that if I don't want the teeth, she'll keep them as a trophy. She shows me the X-rays again; they really look nothing like this monstrous tooth.
Next: The second tooth comes out.