such a disappointment

I have always been proud of my teeth. Okay actually.. not always. But I’d say from 9th grade until now- after I got my braces off at 14, my teeth were straight, white, and cavity/filling-free.

On Tuesday, I went to the dentist. I am a very, very bad girl and had not been to the dentist in TWO YEARS. It was one of those things where you keep saying, oh I’ll go next month.. oh next month… then you get busy and before you know it, 2 years have passed.

Anyway, so I went. I was surprised when the girl did the pink dye thing on my teeth- hardly any pink stayed on (which means they were very clean – no plaque buildup! For not having my teeth professionally cleaned for 2 yrs, I thought it would be much worse. But I am a very avid brusher and I recently started using an electric toothbrush (or battery-operated in this case- Oral B Action something-or-other) So I think that has been working well. yay!

Then the dentist came to examine me. He muttered some random numbers and things about ‘distal’ and ‘frontal’ and things I didn’t understand to the hygenist. Then she put some instrument in my 2 back teeth and took a reading of some sort- it did a lot of beeping and a number came up on this little box. 34. Is that good?

Apparently not. There were 3 spots that were starting to become… CAVITIES. They weren’t deep at all yet, but he wanted to take care of them before they got any worse. NOOOOOO! I don’t GET cavities! I brush 2-3 times a day. I don’t eat a lot of candy. I don’t drink coffee or tea or sugary beverages! I DON’T GET CAVITIES.

I think the problem is this- I focus too much on brushing the backs and sides of my teeth, near the gums. Apparently my mom does this too (I broke her the bad news yesterday about my failings as a daughter who had thousands of dollars invested in her mouth as a child) And I have pretty deep grooves in my back teeth.. so I guess I just missed some spots back there. DAMN.

So this morning, I woke up early and dragged my ass into the dentist office before work- 7:30am. No Novacaine was needed as he removed the ‘soft’ parts (although at one point he got a little too close to a nerve with that tool of Satan drill and I nearly jumped through the roof!) My mouth was killing me from keeping it open so long… how do people DO THIS ALL THE TIME? Really though, I shouldn’t complain… he drilled, filled them in and I was out- all in less than 15 minutes. I wasn’t even late for work!

But I have to say.. I am very disappointed in myself. I made it nearly 27 years without a cavity. TWENTY-SEVEN years. I was going to be so proud to be like 75 and say that I had all my teeth and they were all filling-free. But now… now I can’t say that. Luckily though, they weren’t bad enough to need REALLY filled and I didn’t need Novacaine or drilled really deep or anything. So I will consider this a lesson-learned and I will brush the flat parts of my teeth better.

And I’ll go to the dentist like a good girl.

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