Gum Surgery

The doctor inserts his gloved fingers inside my mouth and presses gently upon my gums. Once he called my tongue “inquisitive” in his musical accent, and ever since then I’ve noticed the way it moves around his instruments as if it has a mind of its own. It can’t keep still. Even now, it follows where he probes like a dog on the heels of its master.

“Do you floss?” he says.

Yes, I speak around his fingers. Every night.

Dentists develop an ear for a language that exists only inside their offices, a language of vowels and mushy sounds shaped by pressed tongues.

“Hm,” he says, unbelieving. (But dentists are also like priests: they absolve us of our sins). His dull tool scrapes scrapes scrapes at one tooth with a vengeance, and the sound echoes against the roof of my mouth. I can only see his beautiful black eyes magnified a thousand times by the funny little glass contraption on his forehead, and which he uses to see the minutiae of gunk I dutifully accumulated in between my teeth. He exhales through his nose.

“How’s school?” he says.

Good, I articulate. Once he asked about the tuition at the private school where I work. It’s more than a semester at college. He nodded approvingly. He has two kids.

He mumbles something and his assistant hands him a tool, something flat that pushes my rebellious tongue to the side. Dentists also have another language they speak only to their assistants. It consists of numbers and obscure names. There’s a specific tone and cadence to it, quite distinct from how they speak to patients. It’s a low rumble, a cold, clinical dialect that cannot be pronounced over a low level of decibels. I’ve never heard an assistant ask them to repeat.

In the corner of the room, a large TV shows the scene of a school shooting. Flowers and teddy bears on the sidewalk, a strip of yellow do-not-cross tape across shattered glass doors, the bushy brown hair of a teenager in the arms of a woman. The sound is off. The chyron reads: 13 dead, dozens injured. I didn’t catch the name of the city.

The doctor probes at my gums with a steak knife. I picture the soft-pink flesh bright red where he stabs at it, observing I-don’t-know-what-all kind of reaction. Sweat pours freely along my ribs.

“You teach English, right?” he says.

Yeah.

“What grades?”

Ten through twelve.

“Oh, that sounds like hell,” he laughs.

No, it’s great, I want to say. I want to say: when schools have resources and kids go back to safe homes where their needs are met, teaching is great. But my tongue is a prisoner, so I shrug as hard as I can to translate the same idea.

“My son’s in ninth grade,” he says.

He pushes with his feet and propels his rolling stool away from me, and I feel the absence of his fingers as if they’d become another organ inside my mouth. My lips smack to call forth the moisture which he has stolen. He lifts his forehead contraption. He frowns his thick, perfect eyebrows. “Hates school. Won’t do his homework. Just wants to play video games all day and night. All day and night,” he sighs. The baby-blue of his scrub distends at the belly. He wears orange-and-green retro Nikes and a crown of very thick black hair around a smooth bowling ball of a head. I like to imagine he also speaks a secret language to his wife and kids, something only they can understand.

“This is where you are,” the doctor says. He’s pointing at a bright poster on the wall that shows the stages of periodontitis. I’m a three. The picture shows a row of crooked yellowing teeth under off-pink gums like the hems of dusty curtains.

“Okay,” I say. My hands are on my lap. I’m fiddling with the pair of sunglasses they gave me to protect my eyes from the overhead light. In the background, the whirring sound of a tool pierces through the wall. Every few minutes, I have to force my jaws open to stop from grinding my teeth. They gave me a retainer for that, to wear at night. I don’t wear it. My therapist says I refuse help to punish myself. Says I think I deserve pain. For what, I want to ask her every time, but I don’t, lest she think I’m being sarcastic.

It’s not true that I think I deserve pain. I go to great lengths to avoid it. Take the dentist. I come to the dentist like an atheist who can’t help but cross themselves when they enter a church; superstitious. It’s a pilgrimage I force myself to go through every year. If I don’t, God will strike me down for my hubris and plant in a root canal, and then I’ll have to convince some hapless doctor to put me under general anesthesia, or kill myself. That’s how much I don’t want to be in pain.

Every year, when the dental assistant pulls out my X-rays on the screen attached to the chair where I lie tensed and sweating, I count my teeth to make sure.

“I don’t have wisdom teeth,” I tell her uselessly.

“Oh! Right,” she says behind her mask.

“It’s the next step in evolution.”

Getting the dental staff to like me is crucial. If they like me they won’t find anything. I scan the X-rays and point out the white spots.

“These are fillings, right?” I ask her, like I do every time.

“Yes,” she says.

I want her to say: I see no cavity. You’re good to go. One time an assistant did find nothing, but she said I still had to see the doctor. He managed to find a couple teeny-weeny cavities. Someone’s got to pay the bills. But I didn’t mind. It’s like paying my dues, placing my crumpled dollar bills in the church donation basket. I can afford a couple cavities, sure, no problem.

“Do I have to?” I ask this doctor, like a child.

It’s his turn to shrug. “Up to you. If you don’t, your gums,” here he slides his finger along the line of increasingly terrifying pictures on the poster. On the last one, the discolored gums of some poor fucker have climbed all the way up like the skirt of a whore to reveal the shinning roots of decaying teeth. I guess I have no way to fact check what he’s saying. I could look up the rates of success of gum surgeries. But my therapist says I oscillate between paranoia and catastrophizing. Does she know about the rate of school shootings over the past decade? But I don’t say that. She says I’m always on the defensive.

“Okay,” I tell the dentist. “I’ve never had surgery before.”

“You won’t feel a thing. What we’ll do is, we’ll take some skin from the roof of your mouth and graph it onto the fissures in your gums.”

Is it catastrophizing to ask if the roof of my mouth will be okay without some of its skin? “Okay.”

“You’ll be numb. You won’t feel a thing. Sutures will dissolve after a couple weeks. You won’t be able to eat solid food for the better part of the day, okay?”

Already he’s taken off his gloves in a smart snap and now he’s hammering the keys on the computer, typing GIANT NEEDLE inserted into SOFT PALATE and Googling MOST EFFECTIVE WAY TO ABSORB BUCKETS OF BLOOD.

He thinks I’m worried about eating. Pain is something I’ve never had to deal with. I don’t have wisdom teeth, I’ve never broken a bone, I’ve never been punched, I’ve never passed out, I’ve never had surgery, I’ve never been in a car accident, I’ve never given birth, I’ve never had my heart broken.

As an infant, I put myself through such crying fits I would stop breathing. At first, my parents took me to the hospital every time. Then they learned the trick. They held me up by the foot to force me to take in air, to chase away the purple of my face. Soon all my siblings knew the trick too.

But I don’t remember any of that. What else I don’t remember: my infant rejection of my father, my parents’ divorce, our leaving with everything piled in one car, except for my eldest brother, who stayed behind to take care of my father’s recovery from a heart attack—unrelated, in medical terms, to the divorce, but in a poem definitely related.

“I can prescribe something for your anxiety,” the doctor says, still not looking at me. “A dose of Xanax should help.”

And what about knocking me out cold? But apparently general anesthesia is reserved for actual surgery. I thought this was actual surgery.

He smiles. “With Xanax, you won’t worry about a thing.”

In the bottle, there are only two pills: one for before, one for after. Alprazolam 10 mg, the label reads. “TEN milligrams?” my friend Zoe yelled in my ear when I told her. “What’s the name of this doctor again?”

She said I could afford to cut a pill in half, save the other for a rainy day. What’s the point of that, though, what’s a rainy day? When am I going to want to feel relaxed? I don’t need it. My therapist says what I need is not meds. What I need is to talk it out. Isn’t that what I’m doing with her? Being defensive, she calls it, when I ask rhetorical questions. Whenever I make a suggestion, you use this tone, she says. What tone? That one.

All I do is talk, and I see no improvement I can put my finger on. Not any real improvement. When I leave the therapist’s office–which looks nothing like it does on TV: it’s all tiles and gray walls, just like at the dentist’s–I think about what all I said in there and it plays on repeat in my head like a broken tape. And it all comes out like a hot air balloon: big and impressive on the outside, whole lot of nothing but air inside.

What I could talk about is, what it feels like to see the emergency lockdown alert on my phone at school. What it’s like to open the door of my classroom and see a kid walking by, laughing at something stupid on his phone, and yell, “GET IN, GET IN NOW,” and see him start running, no questions asked, limbs all akimbo from the terror that floods his bloodstream.

But that’s not what she wants me to talk about. Distraction from your real pain, she calls it. I don’t see how thinking about a kid lying in a pool of blood, crushed under the weight of his backpack that didn’t protect anything, is distraction from pain.

Catastrophizing again. Well.

I take out a pill. Pop it in. Science experiment, I call it. I sit down on the broken-down La-Z-Boy in the living room, careful not to tip it over, and I wait. Soon my body dies, and I consider it from the vantage point of my brain: useless limbs, ugly leatherbag of a body. I don’t think I deserve pain; I don’t hurt it, this sack of meat that belongs to me. I protect it, ritually, by paying my dues etc. It isn’t my fault I need gum surgery. I can’t wait until the roots are all exposed.

On the day of the surgery, I waltz in cool as sin. My limbs are pleasantly heavy. My tongue rests, for once, at the bottom of my mouth. Everything is soft and hazy, like a memory. I mumble something to the receptionist and she seems to understand me, unless she recognizes me from the many times I tried to make her laugh–important they all like me—and she did, politely.

She takes my arm and sits me down on a series of chairs in a series of rooms. I sink into each. My limbs mold themselves onto the hard plastic. Blue-scrubbed people-shapes move in and out of my peripheral vision and make sounds that eventually resolve into words, but I only figure them out too late, once the shape has left.

The doctor comes in, shiny. He leans in close. I can see each follicle of his black eyebrows like the trunks of trees. I think: I myself have almost none. Those I do have are too pale-blond to stand out, and what kind of power would my gaze hold if I had a pair of those?

“How do you feel?” he says.

I’m just great, I want to say, but I can’t feel the muscles of my face. I am weightless, cotton-made. The balloon of pressure inside my chest is there but I can’t feel it anymore. The world disappears. There is only the doctor’s magnified eyes, behind the glass contraption. The eyes of God. In them, I see that the Earth is round, and that it is spinning, and that I am only a microscopic nothing upon its surface, feeling feelings that are only big because I am looking at them closely under a microscope pointed at the wrong thing, and I lose myself in the void of his pupils, untethered, free.

His tools leave no feeling inside my mouth, but I hear the sound of his scraping, very loud. I forget what it means, then I remember, then I forget.

“Still doing okay?” he says.

I raise my thumb up like a mountain raises itself from the ground, but he’s not looking.

I’m fine now, I want to tell him, the world, God, him. I haven’t been fine for a while, but I’ve run out of tears to cry. I’m in that phase now.

The doctor scrapes something and sighs. His assistant passes him a tool.

People don’t get grief, you know? I say. Those that do get it don’t get it. All the while you’re telling them your mom is dead, they’re thinking about the injustice of how their mom is dead. What they don’t understand is how truly, cosmically unjust it is that my mom is dead.

“Hm,” he says.

You see, she was only seventy. Seventy is young for an old person. Women live longer than men, too. She lived exactly eleven years more than my dad. And she was the toughest little woman I knew. And the thing is—are you listening?

The doctor shifts, the stool creaks. He says a series of numbers to his assistant. He leans close again. He is listening.

The thing is, she didn’t know it was going to happen. She got results back from a random lab work, one of the gazillions she had to take to check on her diabetes and her cholesterol, and it came back with an abnormal level of red blood cells. Drug overdose, said my aunt, who was a nurse. That’s bad, because that means she won’t be able to keep taking her regular meds. OK, yeah, that’d be bad, right?

The doctor adjusts a tool, breathes loudly against his mask.

She—my mom, not my aunt—wanted to stay home and see her doctor on Monday, but my aunt forced her to go straight to the hospital. She’s quite bossy, my aunt, from being the youngest. So my mom went. She always did stuff if you pushed her hard enough. Ten days later she was dead. Aggressive liver cancer, said the biopsy that came in too late.

The doctor pulls on a long black thread. I see it from the corner of my eye. It is a lifeline that tethers me to him. I feel its warmth throb between us. Then he plunges it in again.

But here’s the deal, doc. Aggressive liver cancer makes zero sense. She smoked a pack a day from the time she was fifteen. That’s fifty-five years of constant smoking. Ever heard of a fifty-five year streak and clean lungs? I bet not. My dad must have matched that at least, and he had the decency to die of a predictable throat cancer.

The tube that sucks in my saliva gulps it in. A bright pinpoint of light makes my eyes leak and the tears are absorbed by the paper bib they put around me.

The last time I talked to her was a Tuesday. I was at school, in the part of a building reserved for administrative offices. I slipped into an empty office. Teachers have nowhere to work and the place is drowning in empty offices. I called and she picked up on the first ring. She was moaning from the pain, in spite of the morphine. She couldn’t talk too much. I said I love you and she didn’t reply but I think she heard me.

“She definitely did,” says the doctor.

You think?

“Or if she didn’t she knew it.”

You think so?

“Of course. Mothers know these things. And she would have said it back if she could. She always did, remember?”

Thing is, I didn’t know it was the last time. The next day I woke up and did yoga and read the paper with my breakfast. Then I took my phone off Do Not Disturb. Saw all the missed calls. Talked to my nephew, who was the only one to pick up for some reason. Then I went to work. I actually did work. I don’t know why. I bought a ticket and I told my boss I’d be gone, and then I went home, shaved my head clean, packed black pants, black shirts.

“Nobody ever knows it’s the last time,” he says, trading tools. “Nature of the thing. One area you can’t prepare for is the inevitable.”

It’s not fair.

“Nobody said it was. Raise your hand if you feel pain.”

I raise it.

“Really?” he says. “You shouldn’t feel anything.”

But I do, a jolt, electric, straight through my jawbone, buzzing inside my teeth, a nerve that cannot be numbed, a hypersensitive spot that fills up the space between my bones and my skin.

The doctor presses a needle in my jaw and it doesn’t take away the pain. He puts half his hand inside my mouth and flattens my tongue, fills up the space. I eat his entire fist, glad for the weight of it against the hot wire shooting right through me. Everything leaks now, my eyes and my nose. The goop falls on the doctor’s gloved hand. He doesn’t mind. Behind the magnifying glass, his black eyes hold me there, in the unending pain.

A halo of light frames his head. The assistant holds my hand tight as I moan. You’re doing just fine, she says. You’re doing just fine.