Glad Not To Be Victorian

As you may know, I study and teach about the 19th century for a living. Every time I read heart-wrenching stories of people losing their children to illnesses that common antibiotics now easily cure, or tales of people who spent their whole lives being able to see clearly only 12" in front of their faces, or descriptions of the process by which type was set to produce books, I am unendingly grateful to be living in the time of penicillin, easily-affordable contact lenses, and computers with word processing features.

But today, in five minutes at the dentist's office, my whole world changed in ways that I am pretty sure will make me a better human being--and it's all to do with modern technology.

My dentist has been taking a class on this new procedure for treating TMJ. (Don't know what TMJ is? It's a problem in the joints of your jaw that leads to charming crackling and popping noises when you chew, and sometimes the added delightful bonus of being unable to fully close and/or properly open your mouth at all. Also, it comes with regular dull pain, occasional stretches of intense ache, as well as headaches, neck aches, and even tension in your shoulders. Apparently, along the lines of that old song, "the ankle bone's connected to the leg bone..." all those things are connected to the nerves and muscles in your jaw, so the pain eminates outwards.) So, I've had TMJ since I was in early high school (read: twenty-five years), and there have been points in my life where the pain was pretty unbearable.

One dentist tried a night-time mouth guard, of the kind that you wear to keep you from clenching your teeth too much. His logic was that he could see a wear pattern on some of my molars that suggested I was grinding them at night. It didn't work. Other dentists basically told me there was no cure for TMJ, but I could take 400mg of ibuprophen at a time, if I liked. But this dentist I have now suggested that there have been studies linking TMJ to problems with your bite -- you know, the kinds of things that orthodontists fix with braces -- and that if I wanted to do the whole adult braces thing, that might help. Never having worn braces as a kid, I considered it. But I've always been just too busy to get myself to an orthodontist to get it sorted out.

And then today, at my routine cleaning, I told her that I'd had a recent bout of pain from the TMJ. She had me do a series of exercises with my jaw, to let her see if I could bite down and then slide my lower jaw from side to side. Short answer: I couldn't. My teeth wouldn't slide on each other because at a few points my molars were sticking up too far. In essence, I CAN'T grind my teeth because I can't slide them back and forth on each other at all.

Which probably explains why the mouth guard I was given long ago to keep me from grinding my teeth at night did nothing to help my jaw pain.

Know what my dentist did instead? She shaved down a few key points on a few of my molars, just by a millimeter or so. It took about 5 minutes. Then she told me to bite down.

It was like a miracle. My mouth closed, and my teeth met, in ways they had never met in my whole life. I felt like when my mouth was closed, it was relaxed. Closed should be a relaxed position for your mouth, apparently. But every time I closed mine, my jaw muscles were having to work overtime because my bite was misaligned.

In five minutes, she fixed what would have taken 18 months and a giant orthodontist bill to fix with braces. And she tells me that in a few days, once my mouth gets used to this new bite, all the stress should melt away.

The headaches should disappear.

The jaw pain should go away.

The neck and should tension should melt off.

In short, I should be a person in no head and neck discomfort for the first time in 25 years.

And I'm pretty sure this will make me a better mother because it's certain to make me less cranky. Right?

It hasn't done anything for the still-crooked front tooth that I've never had fixed. But I'm pretty sure that if the mouth pain is gone, no amount of vanity in the world is going to get me to fix that tooth with braces. Why on earth would I start over with what I just finally got rid of?

And that's why, tonight, I am once again reminded how incredibly grateful I am to live in the 21st century.