BLIND AS A BAT AND TOOTHLESS TO BOOT

“What The Hell!” original multi-media figure by kayti sweetland Rasmussen

There is something viral about the Heathrow airport in London. For the third time the minute my feet found the restroom after landing, my teeth fell out.

I can’t read a word on the map without my reading glasses. I know we will find our hotel, if it’s the same place as it was. English hotels don’t seem to stray for a century or so. But finding a dentist to put my teeth in order was another question. Finding one to do it in a week was another problem.

I always felt comfortable being lost in Venice and in London. I knew I would run into water at some point in Venice, and the English have been trained since babyhood to be polite, and someone always shows up to help. Paris is another side of the coin. I once asked directions in my best high school French and received a snarl much as if I had tried to grab a bone from a starving dog.

Dr. Advice says he hates being lost, but we found him sitting happily nursing a beer with a group of artisans in a bodega in Guadalajara an hour or so beyond the agreed meeting time.

Teeth and eyesight become even more prized in later life, when you realize you can’t read the phone book, a map or a menu. I miss my relationship with the telephone directory. I used to believe you could find anything you were looking for in one. Now it contains everything but your can no longer see it.

When you are forced to call Directory Assistance you receive a disembodied recording from India asking for answers you can’t supply in one word.

The menu, the cookbook, and of course the map can only be read if written in large type–extremely LARGE TYPE. Mostly I’m sad about just plain reading. When I pass a bookshelf I need to stand on my head to decipher the titles. Reading is one of the main things I do and is entirely dependent upon the whereabouts of my glasses.

And I forgot to mention the pill bottle! Who can read that small print? They crowd all the information on one tiny little bottle and expect you to read it?

Three years ago when they finished excavating my mouth I discovered that you could survive by pulverizing all your food in a blender, but it isn’t nearly as much fun. Food vanishes. Not literally of course, but our concept of food as habit, as pleasure, as love.

Steak becomes a memory. You don’t smile because there is nothing to smile about. Your dentist becomes not only your best friend, but a constant companion. The waiter at a favorite restaurant supplies your lunch before you order. Soup and ice cream as usual? You nod while sadly watching your companions chomp away at their salads.

The same waiter is discreetly pleased when you next show up with glasses and teeth.

THE AUTUMN OF REPAIRS

I don’t usually name seasons for the activities they bring.  You know, like Steinbeck’s “Winter of our Discontent”, but this one brought lots of good stuff which culminated in my becoming well-acquainted with several nice men in the medical profession.

First, the good stuff included a lovely trip to Carmel, courtesy of our family to celebrate our amazing 65th anniversary.  Amazing because neither of us is old enough to have been married that long.  We basked in the sun, shopped till our legs felt weak, dined in style,  and spent the evenings enjoying the sunset while overlooking the ocean and large resident flock of sheep who looked as if they never missed a meal.

Arriving home, our children and grandchildren put togther a grand party for 65 people in two days that would have taken me a month in my best days.   So much for good genes.  They obviously did not get them from me.

And that’s the last of the good stuff.

Next came the matter of repairs.  First came cataract surgery, which today is a piece of cake.  You get a bigger and better exam than usual, and in my case, was told that I am “color deficient”, which to the uninitiated, is color blindness.  This, and I have been fooling the public and my students for years that I knew what I was doing.  Then they treat you ever so nicely while you wait your turn among a roomful of old people.  “Why am I here?”)  When I got into the tidy little OR (that’s short for operating room) the doctor I already didn’t like because of the color blindness crack, said abruptly “Well, I hope you don’t cough.”  (That’s because I DO have a coughing problem.)  Not the beginning of a great friendship.  I felt like doing it anyway except he was the one with the scalpel.  This led to new glasses of course, which were much stronger, and very expensive, but introduced me to a charming young optometrist I could really get to like,  so that could be added to the good stuff, because I probably will have to see him again sometime.

OK.  All is going along beautifully, until a bad toothache told me I had come to the end of the line, and would have to break up the lifelong friendship I have had with my teeth.  My charming nephew told me one day “Auntie, I can’t patch you up anymore.”  He went into the next room while I pondered just what he had in mind.

When he came back into the room I was having a lovely conversation with one of his cute nurses, so I was relaxed and unprepared when he said that all the teeth on the bottom had to go.  They were no longer carrying their part of the load.  What the hell did this mean?

Next I went to visit the oral surgeon, who made an appointment for me to come in and he would happily remove them all and give me two (or maybe 4) implants  Easy for him to say.  It’s me that will have to suffer the pain and sacrifice and economic disaster.

I have a deeprooted belief that suffering will make me a better person, thanks to my grandma Nellie.  Who by the way was a Christian Scientist, and didn’t believe in pain and suffering.  It simply was not there.  It’s that kind of upbringing that makes you an agnostic.

Surgery day came and out came the teeth.  All of them.  I kid you not.  The surgery is not bad (I might add that there were a number of teeth which were broken off at the gum, ) and I was in dreamland during the process.  Not as bad as I thought.  After all, I had lost all the upper ones some time ago and survival is possible.

Dr. Advice had a good time giving advice about putting my food into the blender, and calling my new teeth “choppers”.  That’s OK for him to say, but just try putting the Thanksgiving turkey into a blender.

But all is wll, and I have gorgeous new  teeth, which will be the envy of all the other old ladies I know, and maybe even the young ones. Now I just have to get them to work.

And more good stuff.  I no longer have to brush and floss after every meal.  And when someone says “Say cheese” with a camera pointed my way, I can grin with the best of them.