The Tooth

If you read my previous post, The Fall, this will make more sense.

So, there I sat/lay for 10 days, pretty much black and blue before the bruises became chartreuse and a yucky yellow. At first I could only sip liquids through a straw as my jaw was pretty much jammed but eventually, I was able to eat scrambled eggs and other soft type foods. Obviously, I rested and slept a lot for the first few days after the accident but after that, I watched pirated videos and read and reread books.

Toni had passed her Gulf Air test with flying colors and was now spending time with indoctrination, training and relocating into her own apartment with two other trainees. I didn’t want her worrying about me while she was embarking on her own new adventure but I did ask her to see if she could get a recommendation for an oral surgeon from the Gulf Air medical staff and she did.

His name was Dr. Joel Renouardiere; he was from France, and from his curriculum vitae, had mucho experience. My first visit to him proved to me what the word ‘trauma’ really meant. First he told me I was really lucky I had not broken a jaw, then he told me practically all of my teeth were cracked, to some degree or another. After I finished sobbing at this news, he reaffixed the one crown I had which had loosened in The Fall, and then he told me about tooth transplants.

It seems that he, and a few other oral surgeons in France, had been experimenting with tooth transplants over the past decade and they had a pretty good success rate. He would take a healthy tooth (or teeth) from someone who didn’t need it anymore, in most cases, prepubescent’s who didn’t have room for wisdom teeth, and he would literally transplant this tooth, root and all, into an empty space in someone else’s mouth which had been sliced open to accommodate the roots.

Dr. Renouardiere said he had a 12 year old Indian girl who needed all of her wisdom teeth extracted and he had three other patients who needed transplants, so he was waiting on a fourth to set it up. His plan was to have all us ‘tooth recipients’ in the waiting room while he removed the four wisdom teeth, so that immediately afterwards, he could transplant one each into our respective mouths. I agreed to be the fourth patient.

On the day in question, I sat in the waiting room with two men and another woman. We spent our time wringing our hands and discussing the decision we had each made. The general conclusion was that it couldn’t hurt to try and if the transplant ‘took’, we could look forward to several years before considering another solution. Remember, this was 1985. (Great strides have been made since: read this and this.

We didn’t have to wait but about 20 minutes, then each of us were simultaneously taken to a separate room where we were given injections to deaden the specific area in our mouth. In my case, Dr. Renouardiere only had to reopen my original wound; with the other patients, he had to actually slit the area as their gums had already closed up because they had been waiting much longer than I.

When it was my turn, Dr. Renouardiere then came in carrying my new tooth in a sterile container and, using a small, wooden mallet, lightly hammered it into my gum. I was cleaned up, given more pain medication, told to only eat liquids and soft foods and to be careful while brushing for a week, and to call him if I had any problems.

Thankfully, I didn’t have any problems with the tooth until I relocated to Cairo a few months later. Dr. Renouardiere told me that the previous transplants they had done collectively had lasted 9 years, as that was the amount of time that had expired since they began experimenting; it was possible it could last longer, they just couldn’t be sure.

P.S. I’d like to interject here that until this accident, I had a mouthful of great healthy teeth which I had evidently inherited from my maternal grandmother who died with all of her original teeth. Remember this when you read my next post.

Jane
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