My dental insurance changed to the surprisingly-obscure Blue Cross Blue Shield dental coverage. “Do you take Blue Cross?” I asked the receptionist at my dentist’s office, located in the swanky high-rise where I used to work.
“Blue Cross dental?” she squealed with disbelief, as if I proposed to pay with foot massages and personalized limericks. My mouth twitched with disappointment that it would no longer be admitted to the ritziest dentist office it has ever been castigated in. The waiting room featured a clear-door refrigerator that offered bottled water and other sugar-free liquid refreshments. The magazine selection ran the yuppie gamut from Bon Appetit to Golf Digest to The New Yorker. And each plush-white dentist chair had a magnificent 10-story view over the Boston Harbor, a wonderfully distracting sight while one is having her gums scraped bloody with a metal pick.
I called Blue Cross Blue Shield in search of a new dentist. The customer service rep found one dentist in all of A-town, but she also gave me the phone number for an office in Boston’s Chinatown with 12 Chinese-sounding dentists — the motherload!– and recommended that I call them first. But the Chinese receptionist immediately shot me down. “We no accept new patients,” she said in cheerful, halting English. “None of the dentists are?” I asked. “We very, very busy,” she insisted. Click.
With pessimism welling in my gums, I called the lone A-town dentist and asked if he was accepting new patients. “Would you like to come in today?” the kindly receptionist asked. “We have openings at 10:45, 3:30, and 6pm.”
And with that, I had a new dentist and a last-minute dentist appointment. I lightly brushed my teeth, remembering when my siblings and I used to try to compensate for our day-to-day neglect with heavy pre-appointment scrubbing. My mother used to warn us that “The dentist can tell when you brush too hard,” rendering me totally freaked out by his oral omniscience.
My new dentist’s office is an old town mansion converted to office space. I filled out the new patient paperwork in the waiting room, which had the homey feeling of a living room replete with a fireplace and large bay windows. A blond mother and her pre-teen son sat across from me. He violently skimmed a National Geographic while spurting random nonsense: “Woah that ape is ugly… I never heard of that country… Ew, is that a close-up of a booger?” When his name was called and he somehow got his gangly body through the narrow hallway towards the patient rooms, his mother sighed and began nodding her head to the beat of “Sweet Caroline” by Neil Diamond, which was being piped throughout the office. For a second I thought she was going to start dancing.
Soon I was fetched by the dental hygienist, who immediately began talking about all the X-rays I needed. 18, to be exact. When the radiation dosing ended, she seized a metal pick and began scraping away at my teeth. “You ever wear braces?” she asked. I shook my head no. “You’d be an excellent candidate for Invisalign,” she said. “With Invisalign, you’d wear custom aligners that would move your teeth into the correct position over time.”
I was a little alarmed. One of my lower teeth does have a pronounced underbite, but was it that ghastly that I needed orthodontia? She told me all about Invisalign, my gaping mouth rendering me mute. “It’s very gentle, but powerful,” she said. “People are so amazed at how quickly it works. They can see results in a year. And the aligners are completely transparent.”
When the dentist came in, he picked up the Invisalign spiel. “You’d be an excellent candidate for Invisalign,” he stated, poking my mouth with his gloved fingers. I figured they were drumming up some extra cosmetic dentistry business, but then he began to talk about the long-term affects of having an underbite. Jaw problems. Excessive molar wear. Increased risk of tooth decay.
“All right, all right! Give me a pamphlet!” I said, unwilling to continue the nonchalance about my misaligned teeth. The hygienist handed me a veritable encyclopedia about Invisalign along with my complimentary toothbrush and floss. We said goodbye and she flashed me a big smile. Normally when I look at people, I focus on their eyes, but with her, I stared at her pleasantly white, perfectly aligned teeth. I realized that in her eyes, I must have the teeth of a monster.
