Kudzu Queen

By Tamara Ducote

I had this big tooth drama recently, and it has caused me to question my perception of reality. Just as there are no fender-benders between airborne jets, and no minor heart attacks, there is no such thing as a minor tooth problem, if one of my own personal teeth is involved.

My mind became skewed in this direction because of the most hellish week of my life, which occurred this past summer. For four days, I nursed an abscessed tooth while my dentist was out of town. It was only my innate cowardice that kept me from suiciding.

I’m still traumatized. I’ve been looking for a dental-oriented PTSD support group to help me deal with the horrifying flashbacks. Ever since, even the smallest twinge in a tooth, and I’m convinced I’m on the fast track to another week of unendurable pain. I immediately dive into the twin pools of hysteria and panic. And I dive deep.

So this renegade tooth starts bothering me during the last holiday. My teeth ONLY act up during holidays. I seem to have inherited my parents’ Puritan work ethic, but only in my teeth. Whereas the rest of my body wouldn’t at all mind calling in sick to work, my teeth just won’t have it. The teeth never break bad during a regular working week. All of my teeth are in cahoots (I guess they have union meetings, or something, while I’m asleep) with each other to only cause agony when my dentist is at least 1,000 miles away.

I beg and grovel my way into an appointment with this emergency dentist (I think my broken sobbing finally touched the heart of the appointment secretary), and he says I have something-something-itis, and I need a root canal. Suit yourself, I said. You can surgically remove my head from my body, provided you make the toothache quit. Just make it stop. Above all, for the love of humanity, please prevent it from getting any worse.

The emergency dentist advises me to consult with my regular dentist, first. He doesn’t want to steal patients. He also gives me a generous prescription for pain pills, so I can’t really harbor serious hard feelings against him.

I float through several days in a narcotic haze, terrified to quit taking the pills, because then my tooth might go apeshit, and I know full well I cannot deal with that kind of pain ever again. Finally, my real dentist returns. I make an appointment for a root canal.

My regular dentist examines me and says there is nothing at all wrong with my tooth, not even a cavity. The dentist is too polite to tell me I am imagining the whole thing, but I can tell that’s what he thinks.

Sergei tentatively offers his opinion. I can tell he is picking his words as carefully as a Laotian tiptoes through an old mine field. “Sweetheart, you do seem to have, umm, issues with dentistry. And you have an, umm, very healthy imagination.” He stops short of calling me a dental Munchausen case, but I get the point.

So, the whole thing was not real. Even now, as I sit here typing between tooth throbs, I keep reminding myself that it is NOT REAL. Maybe my teeth are not even real. Perhaps I am wandering about the world with a beak or a butterfly-like proboscis, and just don’t realize it. Maybe this is why John Mellencamp has not come for me, yet.

Maybe my whole self is an invention of imagination. Maybe I am merely someone’s dream, or (more likely), nightmare. If that’s the case, I’ll be damned if I’m going to keep going to work or paying taxes or mowing my lawn.

The only reasonable explanation is I am crazy. Surprisingly, this realization does not distress me. I’ve flirted with the sane/insane boundary for years, so it just isn’t that big a deal for me to finally step definitively over the line. OK, so I’m crazy. What now?

At first, I worry a bit I might lose my boyfriend. But my buddy Eddie points out that, “If normal was important to the dude, he wouldn’t have been interested in you in the first place.” So I set that worry aside.

I see a filthy, unkempt homeless man perambulating down Dauphin Street, shouting wild imprecations. I wonder how long ago he was a functional citizen, his only problem being a phantom toothache. I wonder if I ought to start thinking up some wild imprecations of my own and writing them down on index cards so I’ll be ready, when I reach that more overt phase of mental disturbance.

And here’s the thing: I still believe the tooth hurts. I know now it is not a real thing, but the tooth hasn’t gotten the message. I only eat on one side. When I forget and eat or drink something cold on the bad side, I get these nasty jets of pain that induce me to perform the grabbing-one’s-jaw-and-hopping-around dance. Knowing the pains are not real does not make them hurt any less.

If it’s my imagination, why in the world would I imagine tooth trauma, which is undeniably my worst fear in this lifetime? Wouldn’t it make more sense to imagine a lifestyle of great wealth, leisure and capriciously wielded power over countless hapless minions?

Anyhow, I accept that I don’t know what is real and what is not. So when my vehicle starts making a clunkety-clunkety-screeeeeeech sound and then dies in a busy intersection, I decide this is another one of those things that is not real. Just my healthy imagination rearing its ugly head again.

I wonder, for the first time ever, if cars have teeth. Because if they do, that’s certainly what the problem is here. The tow truck driver pretends confusion when I tell him over the phone, “My car is having a phantom toothache. It’s not real. The car just thinks it is. But the car would feel validated if you would tow it, anyway.” He acts like he doesn’t know what I’m talking about. But I bet he deals with this kind of stuff all the time.

“Wait!” I tell the tow truck driver, when he arrives. “I’ve got to get my index cards out of the car. I think I’m going to need those things.”

Contact Tamara Ducote at TDDucote6@aol.com.

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