Dental Adventure Epic (With Irrelevant Picture Of Our Cat As Clickbait)

When dash was reminiscing about ancient and recent adventuring, I was inspired to share a tale of my own, a dental odyssey. One of my front teeth is anchored via a titanium post and early last year it loosened due to an infection deep in my jawbone, etc. etc.

As much as I know some of you enjoy hearing the aged discuss health issues I'm going to skip the interesting bits and just say that repairing it meant 10 months of waiting while the bone healed before they could implant another post. In the meantime I was given a retainer-like plate with a single tooth dangling from it to fill the gap. A most unpleasant looking get-up. Hideous.

I was advised to use it only when in public which meant that at home I walked around minus a front tooth. This was comic inspiration for Mrs. Ltd. and #2 son, both of whom made hillbilly jokes for the duration. Oh the never-ending hilarity. Every time I went to answer the front door I had to pop the mechanism in, and I was always forgetting it on quick runs to the store. In short, a pain.

A couple of months before the reinstallation was scheduled I had to go to the Bahamas for six weeks and attend to our place there. That first week a surf buddy was returning to the States and had me over to help finish his remaining food. I wasn't supposed to eat with the tooth in but I hadn't told him about it and didn't feel like relating the whole saga. Sure enough the thing broke while I was eating and not just into two pieces. I had the pink retainer piece and the main body of the fake tooth but essential connecting bits were gone. Swallowed.

I called Mrs. Ltd about having another one made from the molds and flown over. It turned out just the cost of the replacement itself was $750, never mind the trouble getting it over. The first thing that occurred to me was that $750 was the cost of a new Firewire surfboard that I coveted at the time. Still, I couldn't see going for weeks without a front tooth so I told her to call the dentist and order a new one.

After talking to her I started messing around with the tooth and found that if I put it in just tweaked friction held it pretty well. My teeth seemed to be growing together a little. Even better, a little super glue applied to each side and allowed to dry beefed it up and made for a snug fit. When I called her back and ask her to cancel the order she said she'd been wondering about it too. After all, she said, it is the price of a new Firewire. Great minds think alike. What a help-meet.

Everything was copacetic. I could finish my work there and come back to the States just in time to have the tooth installed.
So I went back to my duties. I had our mechanic do some work and while I was driving him back to his house I said something that somehow shot the tooth out of my mouth. It bounced off the steering wheel and thence to regions unknown. He didn't react but he couldn't have missed it. Bahamians can be very circumspect in regard to embarrassing incidents, probably residue from the British influence. We both carried on like nothing had happened and when I got home I scoured the truck and found the tooth next to the seat by the door. Whew. Lucky it hadn't bounced out the window.

More entertainment for Mrs. Ltd. when I related the story. Particularly because our mechanic there has the worst teeth imaginable. This is not poetic license to get a laugh but the unvarnished truth. It isn't that he's missing teeth--which he is--so much as the teeth that he has are at unprecedented angles, thrown together like jetty boulders.

Whenever I went surfing I wedged the tooth in. It was better than having to explain every time someone paddled up to say hello. One day not long after the incident with the mechanic I was out surfing alone and when I got out of the water a guy I didn't know was sitting in the beach hut. We talked a little, where you from, etc. and it came out his dad was a surfer that had gone to the same high school I had so yadda yadda

yadda and I blew the tooth out again. The poor guy was mystified: 'What was that?' 'Oh don't worry about that, that was just my tooth.' So I told the story while I combed the sand for it and he was such a nice guy

he got down and helped me search. The better part of an hour later it hadn't turned up and I went and borrowed a sand sifter from a friend building a house nearby. I put in two more hours of industrial sifting but no luck.

Now my back was to the wall again and it looked like the replacement retainer was the only option. Almost. This is where I learned that invention has a couple of mothers and the one you never hear about is thriftiness. Okay, cheapness. 

I collected shells and small limestone rocks and was off to my shop grinder. Taking off the surface sheen

I matched them against my tooth color and chose the most likely suspects. It didn't take long to get them down to size and shape, then some fine adjustment and as dash would say, Voila! I had a set of a half dozen out of which I picked two favorites and they carried me sailing through the remaining weeks right to the end of my stay.

Periodontists are the specialists that put in dental implants and I had a good one. Our insurance didn't cover his work and he adjusted his charges quite a bit to help out. When I got back to the States and went in to have the bone growth checked, I took out the tooth and stuck it in my pocket before he came in to look at me so I wouldn't have to explain the whole thing to him. This level of cheapness can be embarrassing.

Naturally then he asked to see the retainer and tooth and I had to pull the little limestone impostor out and tell the tale. He's a good-natured but not effusive person but he howled. Literally. He couldn't contain himself. He praised the workmanship (which honestly was pretty poor). He showed his assistant and went to get his camera. I could hear him in the other room saying 'I love it, I love it, I love it!' I posed for pictures while he whooped it up.

So I figure that's my fifteen minutes of fame. An audience of three, a doctor, his assistant and a receptionist. Basically the same thing happened when the dentist fitted the tooth and there were a lot more people in that office but for some reason the periodontist was the high point. I never even got the new surfboard.