She had gotten so much out of that yoga session and she was relieved to have had her realization about her dog. She was actively trying to look at her situation in a new light, now. She felt positive about the path she was on and yet, any mental and emotional progress she had made that evening was booted right out the door less than a week later at the dentist.
For months she had been experiencing pain between her back two teeth. Whenever she ate, food would get stuck between those teeth and the pain she felt was more than excruciating. She would have to floss the shit out of it after every meal, which also hurt like a mother. After years of never having insurance at work, she finally did at her new place of employment, so she made an appointment with her dentist. She arrived for her appointment and was blown away by the Covid safety measures put in place. These dentists were not fucking around.
She was escorted into the room where the hygienist asked the preliminary questions. She explained the situation and the hygienist checked her back tooth. “The dentist will be in shortly to take a closer look,” she said as she breezed through the heavy-duty plastic lining that filled the doorway. When the dentist came in, she quickly checked her back teeth and said, “I’m glad you came in when you did. You have a cavity so deep that if you had waited even a few more weeks, this filling I’m about to do would have been a root canal.”
She barely had a second to process that information because, truly, at the speed of light, the dentist and her hygienist were hard at work fixing her fucked up mouth. From below the face-shielded masked faces and four gloved hands that were working so in sync with each other she swore it was choreographed, she thought about how unexpected this diagnosis was. She had never had a cavity in her entire life. She had always gone to the dentist like clock work and never once did she leave with a bad report. That is, she went to the dentist all the time – BEFORE – she had met her ex.
Early in their relationship she had had a dentist appointment and her (ex)boyfriend was extremely dismissive of it. He basically shamed her for going. “Have you ever gone to the dentist and had them tell you something was wrong?” he would ask. No, she hadn’t. (But that’s because she always went to the fucking dentist). “It’s a waste of money and time,” he’d continue. “It’s not needed unless something is actually wrong!”
She scoffed at his flawed logic at the time but months later when her next appointment came up, his arrogant, know-it-all attitude convinced her not to go. And she hadn’t gone since. Almost 8 years, no dentist. And this was the result. Escaping a root canal by the skin of her teeth (pun absolutely intended). As she lay there in the chair, mouth agape, she could feel the hot rage tears stream down her temples and into her hair.
She was very aware that some of the blame did fall on her. She could have very easily said “fuck you” and made a dentist appointment anyway. But he had her completely mind fucked. She was brainwashed into thinking that his word was gospel. Plus, she knew the shaming and belittling she would have received if she had come home from a dental cleaning and had had to pay for them to tell her nothing was wrong. But now, here she was 7 years and 8 months later, paying close to $200 of the money she really didn’t have (and that’s with insurance covering most of it), to fix this problem. A problem that would not have occurred, or at least not have gotten so bad, had she not been under his control.
She was angry at herself, but she was so fucking angry at him as well. All the pain and hurt and rage she felt the day they fought about soup, had all come back in a tidal wave of tears. She sat in the driver’s seat after her appointment, the hole in her teeth freshly filled with some smooth material she couldn’t stop tonguing, and just cried and screamed and cried some more. Even then, months and months after she had left him, he was still fucking her over. It took some long texting conversations with her friends to bring her back down to reality.
Basically, it is what it is, she realized. Getting irrationally angry about it wasn’t going to change anything. It just brought to light, though, that despite feeling like she had really moved on, her healing would definitely take time. And despite her best efforts, she knew she could still be triggered by random things for the foreseeable future. All the trauma she experienced with him wasn’t just going to go away simply because she had removed herself from the situation. She could, however, decide how she would react to those triggers. Perhaps having a mental breakdown over a tooth filling wasn’t the most productive way to deal with her feelings. But it helped her learn for the next time she might encounter something like that. And she breathed a little easier knowing that she had addressed these emotions and could now move forward from them.
But also, fuck that guy! (insert middle finger emoji here).
Stay tuned for Chapter Twenty Eight. New chapters posted every Wednesday at 8pm, EST.