I can always tell when I’m in great need of a vacation: I start to dream about teeth. There are more subtle signs that often escape me. The first of which is the emergence of the robotic hygienist. She lurks inside of me and, fortunately for all those involved, doesn’t rear her ugly head too often. The other is the OCD hygienist. The one who doesn’t enjoy the human variety of her coworkers and sees them only through OSHA-colored glasses.
To survive the reality of a dental office for decades, one has to care for both the body and the mind. They say, “Dentistry maims its survivors.” This can be true of both mental and physical well being if we don’t take an adequate amount of time off.
I’ve been labeled a C.E. junkie in the past. But this vacation week, I wanted nothing to do with teeth. Big teeth, little teeth, interestingly odd teeth or perfect teeth: They were not on the vacation agenda.
But I was wrong.
I took a cab from my hotel in the French Quarter of New Orleans to the cruise ship terminal. My taxi driver, Dimitri, told me he was from Croatia. “That’s different,” I thought. Not that I expected him to look like Satchmo, but I was unaware of NOLO being the melting pot that it is. It reminded me of the time I was on the banks of the Thames in London. It was the day of the Lord Mayor’s parade. A beautiful majestic spectacle full of all the pomp the Brits do so well. What surprised me was the music. It was one Dixieland jazz band after another. Who knew the English were so fond of traditional American music? And this was long before London had a mayor born on U.S. soil.
While my cab was at a stoplight on Bourbon Street, a young man crossed the road in front of us. The only thing odd I noticed about him was his plaid undergarments hiked up to his waist. His jeans seemed to sit, precariously balanced, farther south. I thought that style had come and gone. “Look at him,” Dimitri said with his heavy Eastern European accent. Dimitri held his hand up and dramatically waved it around a bit. “Just look at him. All his tattoos, probably cost $400 a piece, and yet he is missing a front tooth. Just stupid. He cannot fix his front tooth?” I wanted to say, “You’re preaching to the choir.” But instead I uttered my newly learned Southern expression, “Um- Hmm,” with a big emphasis on the “Hmm.”
A few days on the cruise ship and I was starting to feel like my old self again. I eagerly awaited climbing Mayan pyramids in Belize with my newfound zest for life. Halfway up a hill to the Xunantunich ruins, my guide stopped to pull a leaf off a tree and asked, “Anybody know what this is? Here, taste and see if you can tell me.” It was allspice, but nobody in the group had guessed it. The Mayans used this leaf to cure toothaches. They tucked it between the gum and the tooth to relieve pain. Hmmm. While I wasn’t so sure about the pain part, it certainly may have had some antiseptic qualities to it.
On we went to the pyramids. During the excavation, remains had been found entombed midway up, in the front of the structure. What the archeologists were surprised to discover was that the deceased were Guatemalan. According to my guide, this was established by analyzing the teeth. Dead slaves or prisoners perhaps? The Guatemalans had a diet that consisted of different grains than those commonly used in Belize. The guide speculated that it was the wear and tear on the teeth that distinguished them as Guatemalan. Hmmm again. I had a vague recollection of archeologists doing an analysis of a sacrifice victim’s calculus at a Mayan site. It enabled them to determine the origin of the remains based on diet. Part of me wanted to raise my hand and say, “’Scuse me, ’scuse me,” like that annoying apple polisher we all once sat next to in grammar school. But I was on vacation. And I wondered, “Was there no escape from teeth for me this week?”
When I returned home, I decided to write about my exciting trip and all of its dental anecdotes. Just as I started, I noticed a ladybug land on my keyboard. I remembered my grandmother telling me it was good luck to have a ladybug land on you (in spite of the fact that the bug’s house was on fire and her children all gone). I looked up the origin of the children’s rhyme. I found out more than I wanted to know. And what I found made me wince and smile at the same time. Ground up ladybugs were once used to cure toothaches. They were placed inside the cavity. Seems I don’t know everything there is to know about teeth after all. And there is no escaping the wonderful joy of our odd little niche of knowledge.
This article was published in Hygiene Tribune U.S. Edition, Vol. 8 No. 1, January 2015 issue.
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