It’s Mother’s Day, which I’m celebrating with a toothache. Ouchie!

I have to schedule a visit to see son-in-law Eric, who is trained to know how to deal with quivering, terror-stricken tooth decay victims. He’s the only dentist in my so-called grown-up life whose dental care was able to curb my fear of the dental chair, but it will never be my favorite place to sit. And I know full well the outcome of my visit won’t be what I’m hoping for. It never is. Here’s how I WISH the visit would go:

Eric: Hi, Pat! Nice to see you.

Me (glumly): Help! I have an ow-ie right here on the right side of my mouth. It hurts when I chew anything, even yogurt or bubblegum.

Eric: Hmm. Well, let’s take an X-ray and get to the bottom of this amazing, extraordinary toothache event which has happened multiple times to every single remaining tooth you still have left requiring endless dental repairs necessary because you refuse to brush and floss twice a day like I keep telling you to do but you never listen.

Me (modestly): Just skip the flattery, Doc. What’s the bad news? I can take it.

Eric (after the X-rays): Okay, here’s the problem. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Pat, but it looks like you haven’t been eating enough Macademia Nut Clusters. Your teeth are suffering from this deficiency. The Snickers Bars and Oreo cookies and Gummi Bears just aren’t enough. The pain you’ve been experiencing can only be remedied with more sugar. For some immediate relief, you’ll have to stop at Costco’s on your way home. But look at the bright side – besides eliminating your severe pain, you’ll be accumulating 2% cash back on the purchase using your Costco Visa card.

That’s how it’ll go in my dreams.

In real life, what Eric will be telling me will be . . . .

1. I have a severely abscessed tooth the decay of which has penetrated the occipital lobe of the right hemisphere of my brain which if left untreated will result in hair loss, possible toenail fungus, or a violently painful death, automatically cancelling my AARP subscription even though it’s paid up 3 years in advance. And, . . . .
   
2. It’s time to bid a somber farewell to yet another tooth which has, yes, passed away. And you know what happens to dead teeth, don’t you? They are either designated for the nearest landfill to await their future discovery by tomorrow’s paleo-archeologists, or, they have to have root canals. And root canals have to have crowns. And crowns have to have insurance companies spitting on them when their financing has exceeded their coverage limit, or because, so far, in spite of my son-in-law’s impeccable dental artistry, not even one of mine has been featured on an Emmy award-winning TV series. And, . . . .
   
3. As always, Eric will once more try to carefully explain that due to what I consider to be her obvious and politically incorrect age-bias, I’ve got to quit expecting the Tooth Fairy to show up.
   

Okay, full disclosure. All babbling aside, I have to confess that the universal mantra of today’s dentists is to “Cause no pain”. Even when the patient is their mother-in-law. (True heroism in action.)

Think about it. It’s likely that the only real pain you’ll receive from a good modern dentist in today’s world is when you open his bill. For cowards like me though, the fear-factor rears it’s head in the anticipation – not the execution – of the dental work. And there’s a very good reason for that. That fear was sensibly inbred in us by our cavemen predecessors.

It all started about 10,000 years ago when the hot new technology called agriculture hit the Neolithic scene and hunter-gathering became -let’s say – prehistoric. For millions of years before that, – thanks to their healthy diet of rhinoceros, wild sheep, mushrooms, nuts, seeds and other plants,- early humans who preceded us had nearly perfect teeth even though (gasp) they didn’t brush and floss twice a day. Once they learned to farm, the carbs they learned to grow and chomp on changed all that. From then on, they got big bad cavities just like the sugar eaters of today do.

As a human species, the Neanderthals did go extinct, but not before they inbred with our own homo sapiens species so many of us share some of their DNA.

Don’t read this next part unless you love horror movies. As the cast for our nightmare theater offering, let’s use this little Neanderthal family. According to Wikipedia, here’s reconstructions of how a Daddy, a Mommy, and a 9 year old Daughter could have looked.

• 

• 

• 

Apparently, while earlier human species may not have been able to communicate with a spoken language, it’s now believed that the more advanced Neanderthals were able to make many of the speech sounds we can make, sometimes interspersed with a kind of musical note. When we consider how they received their dental care, though, you can be dead sure, they also knew how to scream bloody murder.

Try to imagine dealing with an abscessed tooth back then. For temporary pain relief, you could chew the bark of a poplar tree which contains a chemical similar to aspirin. Kind of the equivalent of spitting on a four-alarm fire.

This is the kind of dental care our little family had to look forward to. I wish I hadn’t exposed myself to this information, but there’s lots of evidence to show that in an effort to remove decayed tissue, rotten teeth were deliberately hammered, scoured and scraped, possibly with a small flint blade. To fill the hole, they may have used beeswax which could have been a pretty good filling material because it’s soft and easy to work when warmed but becomes solid at human body temperature. It also has the added benefit of antibacterial and anti-inflammatory properties. And if all that didn’t work, the tooth got dug out permanently. With a flint blade. With coca leaves for an anesthetic. We can only wonder how many of the victims actually survived their ancient dental treatment.

You can count on this: the heroic Daddy and Mommy and little Daughter in our horror scene were a lot braver than we are, but along with all that farming they were doing in those days they must have planted the big seed of fear in the 24% of us who acquired the fear of going to the dentist.

As time went on, dental care improved – at least according to the Tooth Fairy. By the middle of the 19th century, you could get your dental care from your neighborhood barber, probably because he was the only one with the right kind of chair. And pliers.

According to Elizabeth Roberts, MA, in the History of Medicine: “Up until the 19th century barbers were generally referred to as barber-surgeons, and they were called upon to perform a wide variety of tasks. They treated and extracted teeth, branded slaves, created ritual tattoos or scars, cut out gallstones and hangnails, set fractures, gave enemas, and lanced abscesses. Whereas physicians of their age examined urine or studied the stars to determine a patient’s diagnosis, barber-surgeons experienced their patients up close and personal.”

I guess they also gave haircuts.

Looking back, I know we’ve come a long way, and there’s hope for the future. CAD/CAM and 3D printing will someday improve some of today’s procedures, and scientists are learning to grow new tissue in decayed teeth. They also promise that they’re diligently at work trying to grow new teeth. Humans are supposed to only have two sets, but a third set may be on its way. As usual, rats and mice are getting theirs first, so don’t stand in line just yet.

There’s one more advancement I’d like to see. I wish I could bring my mouth to Eric’s office, leave it there, go out to lunch, and then come back and pick it up all finished. Wouldn’t that be great? In the meantime, I’m just going to thank heaven for all the good dentists of the world who – like Eric – walk through fire to prevent and relieve pain and who reluctantly keep it possible that we can keep scarfing down all those chewy Macademia Nut Clusters.

Speaking of great, during the time I’ve been writing this blob, THE TOOTHACHE WENT AWAY. I don’t know where to though. Maybe the Tooth Fairy came and got it, doing her job, for once. What a nice Mother’s Day gift! Whew!