I sat propped up in bed late on a Thursday morning, my heart racing as I stared down at the dentist’s contact card on my phone screen. Deep within my throbbing head, my foggy brain struggled to sort through a swirl of thoughts — or, more like page through a catalog of excuses. Was there some way, any way, out of making this call?
Alas, I was desperate. The pain radiating from the back of my mouth had leveled me in a way I hadn’t felt since…well, since the last time I put off addressing a cracked tooth because it “wasn’t that bad,” only to have it completely blow up my life within a few months. I’d eaten two tubes of Anbesol and drank a bottle of Orajel wash and sat in the shower crying and clawing at my face like a possessed maniac, and now, I was about to ring up my neighborhood dental office and beg a stranger to give me drugs. As if that wasn’t agonizing enough, I’d had to text a slew of therapy clients earlier that morning to late-cancel their sessions, which cost me two days’ pay and forced me to confront my own hypocrisy.
Don’t I preach to them that short-term avoidance always comes back to bite you, big-time, down the road? That it’s actually easier to do the hard thing than it is to run away and hide?
Nearly 7 years sober from alcohol and I’m still guilty of pulling from the old drunk’s playbook when faced with inconvenience and discomfort. I can be in a state of physical agony and still default to the path of least psychological resistance, needing to be trapped in a “trial by combat” and maced to a bloody pulp before I awaken to reality.
It took me 20 years of alcoholism to finally see what chronic avoidance could do, and had done, to my life. I don’t believe I have, as 12-step literature puts it, an “allergy” to alcohol; my addiction stemmed from an intense aversion to any kind of discomfort. Like, I would rather risk losing all my teeth than make an appointment for a root canal, or, when it turns out my negligence has resulted in a worst-case scenario where the tooth is dead, infected and needs to be yanked, my first thought is, “at least now I have an excuse to miss that work party I didn’t think I could get out of!”
As for drinking to avoid things, I’ve cleaned up my act. My 48th birthday (April 7) marked 81 months of continuous sobriety, and since it’s taken me nearly all of April to sit down and write this, I’m closer to 82.
Sitting here now with a vacant lot on the left side of my mouth, having had one extraction back in the late 2010s and repeated history again last Friday, I cannot deny this very obvious chink in my recovery armor. The hardwired, hard-core avoidance instincts that presume to protect me will actually lead me into danger, again and again, if I continue to leave them unchecked.
To borrow another Dunk & Egg reference, I could end up like Prince Baelor, emerging from a bloody battle walking and talking like everything’s fine, only to collapse because it turns out half my skull was missing all along.
I did end up with a prescription for Vicodin to tide me over between the endodontist and the oral surgeon, but it took extra pleading on my part once they determined my tooth could not be saved and I’d have to wait another day. Not surprisingly, the meds worked like a miracle, enabling me to get up Friday morning and drink hot coffee, do yoga, shower like a sane person, and even see a couple of clients on Zoom before heading to my emergency extraction. I felt so relieved I cried tears of joy, and if I didn’t already have a full understanding of how the opioid epidemic caught fire, and deep empathy for folks who got hooked, I absolutely do now.
I’m also grateful for the responsible healthcare professionals who hold firm, even when patients call them up with drug-seeking sob stories on random Thursday mornings, and help us do the hard thing we’ve been avoiding rather than enabling another easy way out. My dentist declined to prescribe me painkillers but instead used his connections to move up my root canal appointment, then got me into the surgeon after the root canal was ruled a no-go.
I feel guilty that it came to this, that I let things get so bad that ingesting a controlled substance seemed like the only viable option for enduring daily life. I feel silly, given how quick and relatively painless the dental work ended up being in the end. I feel embarrassed, given how capable of handling pain I always prove to be when I just get out of my own way and allow myself to f*cking handle it. And I feel sad, that it took losing a part of me that I can’t get back — and now have no choice but to replace with an expensive, artificial implant — to realize the folly, and very real danger, of continuing to indulge my childish avoidance.
Working as a therapist, I’m hit every day with the same unfortunate truth that I’ve learned in my own life: Humans too often require a “rock bottom” experience in order to make a change. It’s only when the pain of staying the same exceeds the pain of doing something different that we find the motivation and summon the strength to face our fears. We basically have to push ourselves to the edge of the abyss before we pivot and start walking a new path, or glimpse the grave in order to “get busy living”!
I was fortunate enough to reach that point before drinking took more from me than just “wasted” time (and a good deal of dignity), before it cost me my health, my marriage, my freedom. Of course, stepping away from the abyss of alcoholism didn’t “fix” all of my underlying human issues, and this latest dental debacle is clearly a message — a warning — that the life I’ve worked so hard for over the past 81/82 months will be in jeopardy if I stay stuck where I’m currently standing.
“God keeps sending you the same lesson over and over until you learn it.” Now there’s a 12-step maxim that I do buy into, because it never ceases to prove true.
Now that I’ve coasted through seven days of soft foods and zero exercise, because the surgeon sufficiently spooked me with threats about “dry socket,” the next step is to schedule a bone graft and start the implant process. Part of me still resists taking on more short-term discomfort in order to care for my one and only aging body, but I do feel like being able to chew on my left side would be beneficial. And idk, I think I’d rather not get fitted for dentures before I even hit menopause?
Funny…I initially put off dealing with this tooth because I wanted to “avoid spending money”! 😂 (On a serious note: the only reason I’m able to afford any dental work at all is because of my husband’s job, and I know that even our mid insurance coverage is more than many folks have, in a society that only values human life for what it can produce for the capitalist machine.)
The main lesson from my lost tooth is, as per usual, best conveyed in pop culture terms. There’s only one thing in human existence worthy of our intense avoidance, and it’s only by taking action to directly confront it that we can ever succeed in avoiding it.
Jen Wielgus Journalism 