pulling teeth
or just buying them little hats
Whether or not you get cavities is predetermined at birth and you cannot convince me otherwise!! I absolutely brushed my teeth more thoroughly and consistently than my brother for our entire childhoods, but somehow I got a boatload of cavities over the years and he never did? Seems sus!! To this day, my brother eats candy and/or drinks soda every day and has never had a cavity. I brush twice a day, floss every night, use mouth wash, and have had dentists consistently tell me that my gums looks great, but if I look at a Twizzler for too long, I get a toothache. But my weak teeth have somehow made me stronger. When you’re having your teeth drilled at age seven, you learn to enter a meditative state in the most heinous of conditions, because what is the alternative?? Wait I may actually be describing how I first learned to dissociate?! Whoopsadaisy we don’t have time to explore that right now, so let’s just stick with calling it meditation!
It’s been a few weeks since I graced your inboxes, but time is a construct, fascism is out here trying to steal all our joy, and I may or may not have a strained muscle in my neck? What I’m saying is, I don’t have the energy to go redact a quirky cover letter at this moment, so instead, let me tell you a story <3
CRUNCH! As soon as I bit down, I felt something shatter and my mouth filled with little tiny shards. Well, fuck! It was barely mid-morning, but I’d had a 6:45am call time on set, so it felt like 1000 o’clock. After a long stretch of filming as the titular role of Pedestrian Walking With Big Bag, I’d finally been released to go hang out in the holding area for a break. Sweet relief! I grabbed an apple and peanut butter from craft services (I am a health queen), sat down, took literally one bite, chewed for 3 seconds, and cruuuuuuuuunch crackle crrrrrrck.
Shrapnel from a temporary crown was exploding in my mouth—I could feel the little jagged pieces on every edge of my tongue, honestly my eye is twitching just thinking about it. But I should have seen this coming.
Four weeks earlier, I’d been flossing (once again, health queen) when the crown on my right back molar popped off. For the uninitiated, a crown is this cute little porcelain hat that a dentist makes to cover the head of your tooth when a regular filling won’t give your precious pearly white the protection it needs. It’s concave, like a hat, and mimics your old tooth so that your bite stays stable. And they cost approximately the same as a month’s rent in a studio apartment in an elevator building in decent area, with laundry in-building.
For most people, a crown lasts 10 to 15 years once it’s been mined from porcelain and cemented to their tooth. But I’m not like other girls ;) I’m on my fourth crown on the same tooth since 2013. How fun is that?!
People with strong-tooth privilege tend to get squeamish when I talk about lengthy dental work, so for those soft little babies, don’t worry—the pain in this story is only emotional! The one saving grace of this continued failure is that the crown is on a tooth I had a root canal done on, so there’s no nerve inside it anymore, ergo it can feel no pain.
The first crown failed at the same time as the American electorate. In November of 2016, after working every single weekend of that year to elect pro-choice women up and down the ballot, I’d reached a whole new level of subconsciously grinding my teeth. I was clenching at such an advanced level that I cracked that crown in half! I have a distinct memory of Ubering from my office by Dupont Circle in DC to my dentist on Capitol Hill while listening in to an all-staff conference call. Aaaaand that’s the end of describing that memory because I don’t want to crack another crown via PTSD hahahhaa.
So, crown #1 broke in 2016, my dentist was like “Omg, this shouldn’t have broken after three years, I’m gonna make you a new one for free.” And we love a girl who stands by her work! End of Chapter!
Sometime in 2017 or 2018, the free replacement crown failed in some way. Maybe it was after dem donors poured a gazillion dollars into the Georgia Senate race, not because it was in any way winnable, mathematically, but because everyone had a lot of big feelings and needed to feel like they were doing something? I genuinely can’t remember the timeline, but I was living in New York by then and my Upper West Side dentist made me a new crown somewhere in that timeframe.
Fast forward to summer 2019. I’m living in Brooklyn and driving out to my best friend’s wedding weekend way out in Connecticut. Traffic is bananas and somehow it’s taking four hours to get to the venue instead of the two that Google originally quoted?? I’m going to be so fucking late to the rehearsal, forget freshening up at the hotel before, I’m gonna have to roll straight into this ornate, historic theatre in short shorts with a vintage scarf tied around my chest instead of an actual shirt. I make a pitstop for a giant iced tea and when I pop my Invisalign out to drink it, the crown comes out with it. Chaos!! I text bestie a traffic update and a panicked pic, like “I’m en route, googlemaps is telling nothing but lies, and this just came out of my mouth??!! But see you so soon xoxoxoxo”
Thank god she’s marrying a dentist’s son, so I can get a rehearsal dinner table-side consult—and the prognosis is good! She says the crown looks fully intact, it should be able to pop right back on with new cement, and my tooth isn’t gonna like, fall out on the dance floor. Phenomenal!
The following week, my dentist pops that bad boy back onto my molar and we keep it rolling. “Sometimes the movement of your teeth with Invisalign puts just enough pressure on the wrong spot so a crown comes off, but it’s fine.”
And it was! For all of COVID lockdowns, crown #3 stayed in place. During the Biden Administration, the cement couldn’t have been more secure. Life was (marginally) good!
But you know what’s coming. This past December, when I was being a good person (aka flossing thoroughly) and POP, crown #3 sprang free and landed on my tongue. Which was frankly unpleasant! So I call up my dentist and say, “Hey girl, soooo that really expensive thing you cemented to my tooth a couple years ago just fell off again? So……” I roll in and she pulls out the strongest dental cement available. “Hopefully this stays, but if it falls off again, I think we should make a new one. Your teeth can shift in even just the couple of days that this has been off.” How poignant!
Obviously that crown fell off again like, two weeks later. Because that’s comedy!
So my dentist and I embarked on a 10,000 hour practice to perfect a crown for the ages, and optimize the tooth underneath it. Girlie broke out the drill to reshape my underlying tooth to make the overall landscape of it more crown-friendly. She even added some little ridges to give the cement something extra to grip this time. Then the hygienist ran a little camera all the way around the inside of my mouth to get a 3D rendering of my teeth that my dentist would use to design the size and shape of the new, optimized crown. While she worked on that, I sat with a mold in my mouth that she’d use to fit a temporary crown to protect my tooth during the two weeks it takes for a lab to make the real crown. I guess the little porcelain carving elves work a union schedule. Good for them.
Once the design was sent off to the lab elves and the mold had set, I watched my dentist use a drill to essentially hand carve a tooth shape from the rough shape the mold created. Every few minutes, she’d pause, place the temporary crown into place to see how the bite was fitting then get back to work carving. A lot of dentistry still seems lowkey barbaric, but this? This was art.
Finally, after three and a half hours in the chair, the temporary crown was finished and in place. And let me remind you, this is the tooth alllllll the way in the back, the last molar, so it’s the hardest to see and reach. Think about the widest you’ve ever opened your mouth. Now think about holding that for an hour. And then another. And then one more. I was a zombie by the time I walked out of the office that day. It was like, 12 degrees out, but I was so zonked that I walked from the dentist’s office on Central Park West across the park and down to Grand Central. I actually didn’t have the brain power to do a train transfer to get crosstown.
SO, six days later when I bit into that apple and that carefully crafted temporary crown shattered, so too did my soul! “Can you come to the office right now?!” the receptionist asked as I plucked shards of temporary crown out of my mouth. I sure couldn’t! I had another eight hours on set ahead of me. Of course my dentist was heading out of town the next morning so I’d have to wait til Monday to come in for another temporary fix. It was Wednesday morning. Cool cool cool cool! The following week I went in on Monday and brought that old crown that had fallen off back in December with me. They cemented that baby back on, even though it was no longer a great fit, and by the grace of Gaga, it stayed on until Thursday, when I went in for the grand finale: the placing of the new crown. And lemme tell you, it’s a masterpiece. It’s somehow smoother and more tooth-like than any of my previous ones! Or at least that’s what I’ve decided to believe, because I need this crown to be a win!! And at least my dentist only charged me half the regular crown price for the replacement! Half is still $1400, but if every single one of my hot Substack subscribers venmoed me $47 right now, it would be free. And that’s beautiful <3
If you think about it, life is like a root canal-ed tooth, sometimes that first crown is fucking perfect and it stays cemented to you forever, and sometimes it’s a little off and you don’t realize it until things get really stressful and you’re grinding your teeth in your sleep and one day it just cracks in half!
Depending what year that original crown was made, they might’ve taken a mold of you mouth with stuff that looks like silly putty stuck into a tray in your mouth that hardened over, like, five minutes. And then I guess they poured something into that to make a mold? And then idk, carved the crown out of a tiny block of porcelain with a teeny tiny chisel until it fit inside the mold? (Don’t quote me on that, I’m an MD, not a dentist). But now, they take a 3D scan of your whole mouth and carve it in a computer that calculates the millimeters of space in your bite based on the distance of all your other teeth, and then a magic beam of light goes into a treasure chest full of porcelain, and angels sing and a perfect, smooth, gleaming crown emerges 10 business days later.
How the fuck could the people who only had the silly putty even hope to have as good a fit as the computer/camera/beam of light people?! And that’s why sometimes, having something shatter inside your mouth is actually good in the long run, because you end up with something that fits better.
And I’m gonna let you, the whom who it may concern, apply that metaphor to whatever you want <3
That being said, if anything happens to this crown in the next ten years, it will be the end of me. Because we are only human and everyone has their limits :)
Stay flossy, babes. Downey out!
Having just left the dentist where I got a permanent crown after two weeks with a temporary and daily tooth aches, I can totally relate!
Brilliant.