Teeth

The 20-Teens at 60(copyright 2012):  Teeth

            I am really getting worried about my teeth.  I had great teeth as a kid:  gleaming, straight and with no cavities. My parents were young and dental insurance was hard to come by, so dental care consisted of twice daily brushing, not eating candy, and regular visits from the Tooth Fairy.  When I was about six, I remember going to the dentist to have my upper baby teeth pulled because the next set had taken its position at full attention behind them.  I don’t remember much about that episode other than it was really scary, really painful, and cost my parents a large amount of their meager income.

Since then I have been haunted by nightmares of losing my teeth, and as I became an adult, those dreadful dreams were set in increasingly humiliating locales.  As a new teacher, I not only dreamt every August of being unclothed behind the podium, (aka “The Teacher’s Nightmare”), but in it my teeth waggled insecurely in their sockets. Facing a class of grinning second graders could send me home with a panic attack, so instead I taught high school.  In my slumbers, I’d be giving some profound presentation at an international conference when I would be reduced to mumbling and forced to send my fingers into my mouth to retrieve yet another lost bicuspid.  When I could finally afford excellent dental insurance, I used it regularly to prevent the possibility of either a repeat of the extraction or the manifestation of the night terrors.

Like millions of others in this wonderful, inequitable, yet equal nation of ours, I find myself in my sixties after decades in the workforce without the funds or the insurance (pension plans dropped coverage decades ago) to take care of my teeth when I most need the care.  Years of enthusiastic brushing led to weakened enamel (who knew?).  Old fillings are giving way, requiring root canals and crowns.  My smile is still bright and sincere, but now I am awakened by dreams of tooth loss that are too close to reality to be ignored.  Every person I see during my daily adventures who lacks any piece of the complete dental mosaic inspires me to bite down gently and inhale through my teeth to make sure they are all still there.  Any hint of dental pain sends me to debating the pros and cons of tooth loss versus financial disaster.

So what is to be done?  I ask this on both a micro- and a macro- level:  what can be done to help aging Americans in today’s unexpected circumstances to keep their teeth as long as possible? Medicare won’t cover routine dental care but will pay if a botched extraction results in infection.  It will cover dental care if the lack of dental care prevents treatment of an unrelated severe condition (like___???).  In other words, Medicare won’t pay for prevention, but it’ll cover the things that are about to kill you.  Some friends and family have gone to Mexico for their dental work, but many of us who worked so hard and have lost so much in The Great Recession will simply eat softer food.  I wonder if there is any chance we can get care from Bernie Madoff’s prison dentist?

I will continue to be grateful for the affordable (just) dental plan that sends me to a smudgy office in a nearby strip mall.  If it comes down to saving a tooth or making a house payment, however, I may have to really ponder.  My smile has helped me to teach, to learn, to love, and to face life’s tragedies; it only makes sense to continue to take care of my best feature first.  And while it is true that one cannot live in a grin, you sure as heck can’t chew with a house.  In the meantime, I’ll continue to brush (and floss), not eat candy, and hope that our national medical and dental care dilemmas can be resolved before The Tooth Fairy starts visiting again.