unplanned holes

cw: tooth stuff

Two weeks ago I was sitting in a dentist’s chair with my head all the way back, mouth completely numb and heart racing. A dental assistant hovered above me to my left, hooking the inside of my cheek with a gloved finger and pulling it back as far as it could go. Above me to my right was the oral surgeon, holding one of five bloody steel tools in rotation, warning me how his next foray into my mouth was going to feel. Despite the tremendous amount of local anesthetic you still feel things when you’re awake for a tooth extraction, and you realize there are a lot more chilling things to feel other than pain. 

“Alright, you’re going to hear a crunch and something like a crackle-pop,” the oral surgeon said. “It’s going to sound crazy, but it’s totally fine. Are you ready?”

“Ah -euss -oh,” I said, knowing that I was not, in fact, ready.

I was getting a broken tooth removed after letting it inhabit my mouth for far too long. I don’t even remember how the tooth broke originally — the specimen itself, according to my dentist, was a dental anomaly, since the rest of my teeth are in great shape with no cavities or cracks Typically, he says, people have Generally Bad Teeth or Generally Good Teeth — I have Generally Great Teeth, and one singular Shitbag Tooth. The tooth had given me problems for years, a dud molar with a series of cavities, cracks, a break and then another break. Somehow, it never gave me much pain, never abscessed, never did all the things a Shitbag Tooth can do when you let it get even shittier. 

Eventually, I feared my luck would run out and I’d get a hideous infection below the gum that would spread throughout my skull and cause my brain to melt (at least that’s the prognosis that I gave myself on WebMD). The plan was to remove the tooth, give me a bone graft, an implant post, and a shiny new molar, a 10-ish month process that comes in just under $4,000 (with insurance HA HA). 

Because the tooth was so broken and so stubborn, he had to excavate it into about nine different small shards, all of which I made the perfectly normal and sane request to see at the end of the procedure. He obliged, and when he was done, I saw the shattered remains of my tooth scattered across his workstation tray. It all looked like relatively standard tooth gore, except for one thing: at the end of the biggest shard of my tooth was a white, bloody bulb, almost half the size of the tooth itself.

“That’s a cyst of infection,” he said, poking it around the tray with needle-nose pliers. “I don’t understand how this didn’t hurt, but you are lucky as hell it didn’t.”

As it turned out, I had a relatively large infection under the broken tooth, resting inside my gum and up against my sinus, lying in sinister wait for the day when it could wreak havoc and (maybe? possibly?) melt my brain. I am typically doctor-avoidant until I’m in crisis, and for the first time I was glad to have been proactive — had I waited until it hurt or spread, he said, I actually could have needed emergency care. 

I thanked him and my impressive immune system and left the office.

Over the following week, I realized just what happens when you let someone chip away at the little bones in your mouth until they’re loose enough to be extracted from your jaw. It was sore, it was swollen, it was wildly uncomfortable, and there wasn’t enough ibuprofen in the world. I didn’t dare let my tongue travel to the empty spot where my Shitbag Tooth had once been — I wasn’t supposed to, per the doctor, but it also felt way too creepy and vulnerable to even consider, so much so that when I imagined letting myself do it, I got goosebumps.

Then, one evening, I was gently rinsing my mouth with the prescribed mouthwash, and suddenly, the entire capful came out of my nose. For a second I thought I’d accidentally inhaled it, despite the fact that I’d previously never accidentally inhaled anything other than the Atlantic Ocean. The next day, after I took a sip of water and it flowed out of my nose in the same way, I realized the truth: I had a hole.

“Basically, because you had such a big infection there, your sinus had a communication with your gum,” the doctor explained when I called in a panic. “So now you have a hole, a sinus perforation. It will heal, in time. But for now, there’s going to be a hole.”

The thing about holes, I suppose, is that they are just as frequently unplanned as they are planned. For example, I knew I’d have a hole in my face when I got my tooth removed, but that scheduled hole was balanced by a surprise hole that now acts as a shipping canal for beverages, soups and soon, as someone pointed out, Thanksgiving gravy. I’ve put delicate little nail holes in drywall to hang art, and created an irreparable 4-inch hole in the brick by using the wrong drill bit to mount my TV. I’ve cored produce in the same fell swoop as I’ve punched a chunk out of my own finger, dug a hole for a garden and tripped over a hole dug by a dog, opened a window to clean it just before accidentally breaking the glass. I’m constantly making holes and also having holes made for me, and I bet that if you sat and thought about it, you could come up with an equal amount of intentional and unintentional holes in your own life. Like the doctor said: Sometimes, there’s just going to be a hole.

Which brings me to the purpose of this, which may feel like a departure from what I usually write here, and kind of is, but also isn’t. Thinking of what to write about this time around, it occurred to me that in all of my hole-related realizations (reaholizations?), there is truly no better example of an unplanned hole than the one created by my own relationship to fatness. For as much as strengthening my relationship to my own body has given me — or, in hole-speak, for as much of a void as that effort has filled — another hole sometimes pops up in its place, the one I feel when I realize that despite all of my best laid plans to feel strong and positive about my body, sometimes, I still feel like being fat is a bad thing. Sometimes, fat does feel like failure, and makes me actively want to live in a body that’s different, that’s lighter and leaner and more conventionally acceptable. Sometimes, when I’m angry or sad or frustrated or bored and empty (like a hole, you see), I feel like being fat is the only culprit, as if all of my emotions would be magically regulated and my life would get far more interesting if I were thin. That empty hole also always leads to another one: The generous pit of guilt I carry with me for feeling that way while telling everyone I’m comfortable and confident in my own body and they should be, too. Then, another hole: The disappointment with myself, because intellectually, I know that happiness is actually cultivated blissfully far, far away from the confines of contemplating our withering, flabby little meat sacks, so why do I give a shit about any of this anyways? Reckoning with my relationship to my own body is the psychic equivalent of putting around on the universe’s biggest golf course without clubs or a bull — I peek into one hole, then another, then another, then another, then five more down the way. The game doesn’t ever really end, but for whatever reason, I keep moving across the green as if it will. 

So yeah. Holes? I got ‘em. They’re everywhere. With any luck, they’ll start to fill and patch and heal here and there, starting with the creepy gum tributary in my skull. Of course, then some new holes will probably pop up, some big and some small and largely unplanned. Not in my mouth though. Please not in my mouth. 

Speaking of holes, here are some things that filled the void while I was recovering over the last couple of weeks. 

• Jonah Hill’s new documentary, Stutz. Full disclosure: I work at Netflix, and wrote a story for this film, specifically. However, that does not preclude me from enthusiastically recommending this beautiful documentary, in which Jonah talks more vulnerably about his relationship with his weight/body than I’ve ever heard any famous person do…ever? The movie isn’t about that, though — it’s about his therapist, Phil Stutz — but the film’s whole approach to mental health and reconciling the self you want people to see with the self you’re afraid of is really powerful.

• Shopping. So much shopping. I iced my face and took my ibuprofen and shopped, because what the hell else could I do. Some of the things I bought that I love very much:
  This faux-leather jacket and matching pants, which makes me look like a very professional but also slutty middle aged gay. This denim shirt, which is super oversized and lightweight and just the right color to assist in my attempts to transform into a ‘90s mom of boys. This satin set, which I bought under the assumption that someone, anyone, would invite me to a holiday party. This plaid dress, which is a shockingly nice quality heavy boucle that feels like a slightly thinner tweed, and will look nice with tights and chunky boots. This coat was not necessary in any way, shape, or form, but is great.