PARENTS: Instill in your children the necessity of brushing and flossing their teeth twice each day. Mouthwash is recommended, but optional. Genetically, Brandt teeth are good and strong. One dentist told me that the only way I could have problems is by “near total neglect.” It never got that bad, but I could have done better.

It began with an injury, in sixth grade. I was bicycling to school, and there was a small piece of asphalt ahead of me. I thought I could jump it, but I hit it and was knocked off my bike. My upper front tooth got chipped. The dentist put on a filling. It lasted many years, until one day I was stripping wire with my teeth, and oops.

They called it TennCare–a state-run health insurance program. It was free for anyone. When it came out, employers cut the health benefits of their employees. TennCare only covered the least expensive doctors that they could. I got fillings at a few dentists, but they just kept falling out. I walked around with the chipped tooth for several years.

I went to the Free Clinic in Lynchburg. The student did an excellent job. The filling lasted thirteen years. After that, I walked around with the chipped tooth for many more years. Having scraped together enough dough to see a real dentist, I was told that the tooth couldn’t be fixed for some reason.

I bought a cheap car that had all kinds of issues. It needed to be driven for a half-hour most evenings so the battery would be charged enough to start the car in the morning. When I would go on these excursions, I would treat myself to a blizzard from Dairy Queen. I was partial to the Snickers. Have you ever had a Snickers bar that was refrigerated? They get really hard. So hard you could chip your teeth.

It’s like talking to someone with a pierced septum…your attention is drawn to it so you can’t look at anything else. It was almost better to have most of my front teeth broken than to have just one space to attract all of the attention.

A brother took me to VCU Dental, in Richmond–about two hours east of here. They uttered the dreaded D word. Yes, I needed dentures. No! I am barely into my fifties! My insurance company approved the procedure at Affordable Dentures, located in a strip mall in Lynchburg.

There are three steps: extract all of the teeth, get fitted for dentures, install the dentures. There may be some adjustments made after that. Affordable Dentures had no pamphlet, no website to go to for information. Searching for medical advice on the internet is getting seven different answers from five different websites. I called the office about a dozen times with questions. It turned out that the optimal time to get dentures fitted is six months after the extractions. So, I’ll have no teeth until January.

The extraction experience was the worst three hours of my life. They didn’t knock me out, they just gave me multiple injections of numbing agent. (There’s a reason my insurance works with Affordable Dentures.) In the room, it was just the surgeon and her assistant. I question the competence of both. For the longest time, I felt that the only pain I actually enjoy is when a dentist sticks the needle into the roof of my mouth. That notion has been expelled. Once she pierced the skin, she moved the needle around…a lot. Christ, it was painful. Some of my front teeth were fused to the jawbone, so they needed to cut them out. Maybe an hour into the procedure, they were having trouble with a tooth on my upper left. It was a struggle. They broke it in half just to get it out. The sound of a tooth cracking will be with me forever. My hand gripped the armrest and my leg was visibly shaking. When they pulled the tooth, it was the most pain I had ever experienced. I couldn’t have imagined that a human being could feel so much pain. I am not the same person I was before the procedure.

Other than the hydrocodone, the healing was intolerable. The area around the tooth in question was swollen for a week. It was close enough to my brain that I could feel the pressure affecting my thinking. I sent out some odd e-mails. My diet was restricted to food that doesn’t need to be chewed. Did you know that teeth keep saliva from getting on your lips? The hardest part is brushing my gums…it always brings up memories of having teeth.

It could be argued that all of this is vanity. My teeth were fully functional before the ordeal. But, they hindered my ability to interact in social situations. An empty mouth is much easier to look at than a bunch of broken teeth. The nicest thing is that I am no longer ashamed to talk to people.