3 teeth

Yessiree, you heard it here first. I tru­ly am teething. Or, per­haps, tooth­ing, to be more pre­cise. A [sin­gu­lar] wis­dom tooth has deemed its time ripe to emerge from the evo­lu­tion­ary boon­docks that forms the back­plates of the mandible. My wis­dom tooth, instead of being a mere nui­sance, and a rea­son for peo­ple to look like jaun­diced chip­munks upon removal, serves a pur­pose.

I’m pret­ty sure that sen­tence has way too many claus­es.

I am miss­ing three teeth. One wis­dom tooth [low­er left], one per­ma­nent pre­mo­lar [low­er right], and the baby ver­sion of afore­men­tioned per­ma­nent pre­mo­lar. The AWOL wis­dom tooth is cool, it means when they are final­ly yanked, only the upper ones will come out, and the like­li­hood of dry sock­ets decreas­es log­a­rith­mi­cal­ly.

I used to have the low­er right pre­mo­lar [the baby ver­sion] but when I got braces a few years ago, it need­ed to come out. The rea­son it had nev­er fall­en out was because I had no per­ma­nent tooth under­neath to replace it.

Get­ting that baby tooth removed was­n’t peach­es and cream, or even oranges and cream, or even sour cream. It was just bad. I’ve got damn strong teeth, no cav­i­ties, no fill­ings, no prob­lems apart from being a few teeth shy of a ratio­nal amount. This baby tooth did not want to go; it was huge, secure in its grip­ping pow­er on my gums, and not about to take any sass from a den­tist.

The roots were so intent on being immov­able they were as close to being barbed as they could get. The nerve was sur­round­ed in a per­fect­ly exe­cut­ed four pronged pin­cer.

So the den­tist cut it down the mid­dle with a saw and yanked out each half.

When I got my braces on, they put a bunch of torque on my lon­seome molar, to bring it up next to the bicus­pid, to fill in the gap left by the pre­mo­lar, so my wis­dom tooth would also move for­ward, emerge and take the place of my last molar.

Too many claus­es again.

Thus, what I once thought of as an evo­lu­tion­ary throw­back to our more robust skele­tal struc­tures, and more her­biv­o­rous or fru­giv­o­rous eat­ing behav­iors, actu­al­ly serves a pur­pose for this gracile Homo sapi­ens sapi­ens[me].

I’m going to suck on some ice now.