Atrophy

The body tends to get rid of what it doesn't need.  Muscles and bone waste away when left unused.  So when the bone that holds my teeth in place is relieved of duty, it gets absorbed back into my body.  When they removed my front tooth, the dentists filled some of the leftover space with bone and membrane (cadaver and pig, respectively), to encourage my own body to start to regrow.  And maybe it did.  But without a tooth in place to need that growth, my body went back to its original plan, which was pulling back and regrouping.  So that bone they added last year is gone, and so is most of the bone around it.

This isn't in itself shocking.  This is how the body works.  But it shouldn't have happened so quickly or so completely.  There should have been time to drill a new tooth into my jaw, to give the bone a reason to stay.  But I work quickly, and there wasn't time.  So rather than getting a new tooth last week, I got a new bone graft.  This time, they put in a lot more bone.  This time they will watch me carefully to make sure that it isn't wasted.

When they pulled the tooth last year, I liked to tell people that I had a tooth pulled and a bone graft.  Because "bone graft" sounds like real surgery, the kind of thing that happens on TV.  The kind of thing to justify a nice long sick leave sitting at home playing XBox.  Bone graft.  The truth is, it was just like getting a tooth pulled, which did mean that I got some good pain killers, but the procedure didn't take more than an hour, maybe an hour-and-a-half.  It only hurt long enough to get the numbing started.

So when I went back for more bone grafting, I figured it would be more of the same.  I was sort of picturing the dentist opening my gum like a ziplock baggie, adding some bone, and then sewing it back up.  Cut, open, close.

Except it wasn't.  It took about 3 1/2 hours of stabbing and pulling, the scrape of metal against bone that I could feel through my skull, and the burning thread of chemicals creeping through my gums into the base of my nose.  And the fear that even now, after all this, it still won't be enough.