3-14-22 I TRUST HIM

I spent the afternoon Saturday in the dentist chair on an emergency visit. The dental implant he had drilled into my bone six weeks ago was failing. I could feel it wiggling, like a baby tooth giving way to the inevitability of growing up. That metal stump that was intended to hold a man-made tooth had been deeply drilled into the bone on the edge of my upper pallet. I started noticing its presence more and more, until either my conscience or my angels said, “You’d better have the doctor look at that.”

The technician xrayed it and asked how I was handling the pain.

I don’t have pain, I replied.

Then the dentist came in and asked the same thing. Again, I told him I had no pain.

He explained that the implant had indeed failed. There was severe infection in the bone, which made the other teeth on that side of my mouth unstable as well. So, he set about removing the implant, scraping the bone, inserting a bone graft and stitching up the roof of my mouth. (He had previously only had one implant fail. I guess I was assigned to bring his percentages to the averages)

The missing pain quickly made an appearance.

You’d have to know my history with oral surgery to understand the recipe for the particular anxiety that accompanied the pain. It involves a tooth in the roof of my mouth, an attempt by an oral surgeon to dig a canal to that tooth for braces to pull it upside down and over where it belonged. This was when I was 16 years old. The story includes failed anesthesia, drug abuse (by the doctor, not me), a lost license, new surgery, fainting the only time in my life, and subsequent oral surgeries. I’ve had four babies, three without anesthesia, pancreatitis, Guillain Barre Syndrome and other strange maladies that involve serious pain, but oral surgery brings out a very old anxiety that makes all of these feel relatively minor.

I like my dentist, Dr Allen. I feel like he’s a normal kind of guy who understands normal people, but he’s also pretty experienced, having spent much of his career as a dentist in the Army, where he dealt with all sorts of conditions of the mouth. He has tv screens on the wall and the ceiling in each room, given to distract and entertain his patients. I’m grateful for those.

So, I was slying there (sitting and lying) watching The Great British Baking Show on the ceiling as they started shooting anesthesia into the roof of my mouth. My thighs and butt muscles tightened as I squeezed my hands together. As this repeated, I felt that old recipe rising within. It starts in the chest and radiates up and down. My feet start jiggling, I can feel my elbows tighten up, and I intensify my focus on whatever is before me, conscious that I am trying to distract myself. I watch Paul lift a forkful of patisserie into his mouth up there on the tv screen, but it seems to go in slow motion and his words rise and fall in pulsating mumbles that resemble the variable pitches of a drill. I can feel the fear bubbling up, like I am losing my years and becoming a child again. The fear itself frightens me. Instinctively, I say a silent prayer. And then I feel Dr Allen’s belly against by head. He’s stabilizing himself against me, and he is intensely focused. His bright light shines in my face so I can no longer see the baking show. When the curved needle and sutures appear, I close my eyes. I can feel it all. But I tell myself that there is no pain. There is no pain. There is only discomfort. Discomfort is different from pain. The pressure is disturbing. I can’t seem to control the rising fear. And then I find the words:

“I trust him.”

I repeated the words in my head. “I trust him. I trust him.” The more I said it, the more my anxiety subsided. It was remarkably effective. 

I have tried, in the past, other pain strategies: pretend it doesn’t hurt, pinch your thumb and try to make yourself notice that pain instead, use Lamaze breath patterns (that’s how I had my babies), embrace the pain. They all have varying degrees of effectiveness. But for some reason, this weekend, I found my ability to trust, while it did not take away the pain, made the pain purposeful and strangely bearable. 

I’ve been thinking about it all weekend. There I was, a teenage kid in an old lady body, and this guy is drilling and yanking and scraping and stitching my flesh and bone. Shouldn’t something like that make anyone nervous? I don’t think it matters how mature someone is, that kind of stuff is disturbing. So first, I gave myself permission to feel uncomfortable. Then my next thought, while I was trying to calm myself in the dental chair, was how grateful I am to live in a time and place where there is anesthesia, and antibiotics, and sterile work environments, and people who are trained in these procedures and not just Barbers trying to keep their chairs occupied. 

I thought of my friend Jay Hess who spent six years as a prisoner of war and told me his idea of Hell was an abscessed tooth with Vietnamese music blasting in the background. Knowing I had the very best medical advantages helped. But in the end, repeating these words “I trust him, I trust him,” brought me the most peace.

I would not be myself if I didn’t take this experience and own it in a deeper way. So, home from the dentist with antibiotics and some ice and a few pain pills, I lay on my pillow and ponder myself to sleep, imagining a grove of trees and an oil press with a pile of apostles asleep near the gate. I imagine the pain in my mouth going to His, only multiplied, and the anxiety pressing through every pore, and the great great fear of impending doom. Then, just before I fall into a restorative sleep, I imagine him repeating, repeating, repeating

“I trust Him, I trust Him, I trust Him.”