Three: Teeth

Flossing is Bad for You

I've heard from just about every person in my life that I should be flossing my teeth. 

Knowing that most of the people preaching to me did not in fact floss their own teeth, I denied the action's powers, treating my teeth the way one might their pet cat. I would check in every once in a while, give them a good brush or at least a swish of toothpaste, and only clean them to the point of bleeding when I was hours away from smiling up at a dentist holding some very sharp tools.  This is how I ended up paying for immense tooth pain, a root canal, and a crown with my time, money, and sanity. 

Now I floss my teeth, religiously. 

Fast forward about two years. We're sitting in the present day, atop the San Bernardino mountain range at a school that specializes in outdoor education. This lovely final Monday in February, we have about 500 students from Southern California, enjoying their first experiences with real snow that has just begun to fall. 

Little do we all know, in the span of the next three days, six feet of snow would bury us all so deep as to trap us together for the weekend, with only more snow on the horizon. 

Through the duration of this experience, I cried about three times as often as any of my students did. My tears, however, were not in relation to any fluffy snow falling from the sky, burying me up to my waist. To the reader this would maybe be the obvious cause, but my tears are only brought on by the worst of circumstances, the harshest of outlooks, the most dire of situations:

My tears were flossing-related.

On the night that we were told we would likely be snowed in with our students all weekend, I was attacking my teeth with more voracity than usual, brought on by my state of burn-out and overstimulation. As I have been taking great care of my teeth for the last few years, it's rare that I'll bleed when I brush or floss, but boy was I going hard at my poor pearly whites, almost testing their strength.

If you've ever had nightmares and awoken to then research what the meaning of your dream was, you'd know that a dream wherein you lose any or all of your teeth usually indicates that you are experiencing high levels of stress. The cure is a suggestion to take some time for self-care and relaxation. 

In my case, my body decided a dream about losing my teeth was simply not a strong enough message to my brain that I needed a break. Instead, it took the opportunity of my rather intense flossing session to expel one of my teeth right out of my head, to help drive the point solidly home.

As if reality weren't enough of a nightmare.

Luckily this was not a full-blown, adult tooth that I had lost. T'was instead the crown that I had so dearly paid for about two years prior. 

Holding the expelled, pitiful crown in my hand, I stumbled around my cabin in a stupor, attempting to coax my eleven students into their beds, trying to hide any lisp now coming from the gap in my mouth. They saw directly through my facade, noticing that my voice had jumped about an octave higher than normal and that it cracked every time I asked them to please lie down and stop talking. They registered, regardless how much I tried to hide it, that I was in fact not at all okay, and they all got very quiet, very quickly.  

It was blissful really, to be able to lose my mind in the bathroom in silence.

This did not stop them, however, from needing me around 3am to clean up a nose bleed and to rescue a pad from the now-clogged toilet using two plungers. My work really halts for no man and certainly no tooth. 

Although the lovely students were able to escape the mountain after a harrowing weekend. with an emergency escort and all, I have yet to be able to descend to the dentist to have my tooth glued back into my head. As of this moment I am contemplating a sixteen-mile hike to the nearest dentist out of desperation, but I may work on my patience and await the reopening of any highway that would connect me to civilization.  As of now, I'll remain stranded and toothless. 

If I'm being honest, I kind of enjoy the gap. I think it gives me character.