My body is a cage

The word "cromagnon" often conjures up the image of my history teacher at Sacred Heart, Mrs. Filipovich. Her skin taut against her tiny skull, hair tied in a neat ponytail at the bottom of her nape in a black ribbon... in my mind she's always wearing some shade of grey or black. There was just something about the way she said the word, with a bit of a French accent: "cromagnon" instead of crow-mag-nin.

If I were living with my ancestors in Western Europe about 15 thousand years ago, I think I would be dead by my age. I'm 32, but I'm a genetic disaster of a 32 year old. My eyesight was detected to be going bad by the time I was 10, but I'm sure I remember seeing blurry long before that. At 22, an observant doctor was the first to notice a sad but quirky fact: my left leg is a full centimetre shorter than my right leg. Incidentally, my right eye is a little better off than my left eye (0.25). And, I have had cavities. Lots of cavities. All the teeth that you can't see in a photo of me smiling have fillings. And one particularly sad tooth was the recipient of a root canal at least 5 years ago.

This tooth is why I'm writing today. Funny how teeth and eyes, such tiny things, can overpower our senses when something's wrong with them. I remember the agony and impotence I felt last summer in L.A. when I somehow scratched my cornea and was practically blind for a few hours. I went back to my hotel room and I cried out of pure misery and loneliness. I think that if I had been in Europe during the Ice Age when that happened, I would have curled up in the forest and let a bear eat me alive. Luckily, no bears came into my hotel room and my family and friends came to the rescue. Also, the scratch was due to my contact lense and they didn't have those tens of thousands of years ago. But I would have been blind as a bat anyway. Without glasses, I can't see clearly beyond 15 centimetres. Seriously.

And teeth! Teeth are huge. In Chile there was a program started by the last president's wife to help poor (and "poor") women get their smiles fixed, "Sonrisa de Mujer". The objective was to raise their self-esteem as well as their job opportunities. That's how huge teeth are.

Last Thursday as I ate some salted corn & flax chips (on special!), I heard the crack. I knew it was bad. I had cracked that tooth before, which is about when I had the root canal done, but oh.. I didn't know it could get worse. I will back up a bit. I have two marvelous dentists: one in Montreal and one in Santiago. The one in Santiago did my root canal. The one in Montreal praised it and said "but now it's time you got a crown on that tooth". My health insurance said "hahaha. good luck paying for that, don't count on us". So I made several appointments with my Chilean destist for next month, when I'm travelling there on vacation. A tooth-motivated vacation. Anyway, a month away from the intended crown thing and crack!

What would you do? Ignore it, of course! But it hurt. By Sunday it hurt so much, I wanted to accept Andre's offer to rip it out with pliers. I dosed on Advil, which kind of gives you an indication of how exaggerated I am. It wasn't *that* painful, I suppose. But I could feel the cracks between the outer shell of my original tooth (since circa 1984) and whatever Mr. Dentist had put on the inside. Are you grossed out? I couldn't stop touching it.

Anyway. I called up Ms. Dentist this morning and said "please look at it. I need to know if I can hold on a month -at least- like this". This afternoon Ms. Dentist told me it was a good thing I went to see her. The tooth was broken, good as gone, and could get infected if left alone. She STABBED me in my palate with a needle so painful I had to use up all my grown-up self-control to stop from swatting her arm away. I was curled up in the chair, not screaming but making the high pitched sound of my inner fight against pain. "eeeeeeeeeeee!!!!" Then I started laughing; she must have given me drugs.

What she did next is almost inconceivable to me still, even though I've looked up there with a mirror and I know it to be fact: she took out half my tooth. She just removed it. I saw it, too. My tooth, that has been in my mouth for over 20 years, broken, a piece of junk in her latex-gloved hand. She said I had options: an implant, a bridge, surgery... horrors, just horrors. I wish a tiger would eat me now.