Friday, August 10, 2007

Make It a Six-Pack

I talked not long ago about my loooooong dry spell not seeing a dentist, and how a fractured wisdom tooth finally got me in. Well, today was my first appointment back since they took that "fun" array of 47,000 x-rays that all involve things pinching your gums and poking into the roof of your mouth. The appointment where they would schedule my wisdom teeth extraction. The verdict? I don't get to have four wisdom teeth taken out. Oh no.

I get to have six wisdom teeth taken out.

That's not a typo. I learned today that I have SIX frakking wisdom teeth -- the four that grew in as normal wisdom teeth do (well, for the rare folks that keep them that long), then a half-finished one pushing in on my upper right side, and a little nub of a growth with aspirations of being a tooth some day on my upper left side.

The dentist said he too had had the rare abnormality of having a fifth widsom tooth... but he'd never seen six before. I'm not crazy about being in "never seen that before" territory with a doctor, but what can I do?

I've got shark DNA or something, I guess. Okay, not in a way out there sort of "teeth on my damn nose!" sort of way:


Well, okay... so in practice, that probably wouldn't be cool at all. But let me tell you, I don't think this is very cool either. No matter how "wise" having 150% more "third molars" than the average person might make me.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

If you are the first case of 6-wisdom teeth, will doctors refer to it as "Dr. Heimlich (real name of course) Syndrome"?

so now you are like an X-men character. you were born with a mutation and your super power is um, more teeth?

the mole

Trundling Grunt said...

Maybe you are a shark and constantly grow teeth to replace the ones you leave in your prey. Although I'm not sure a constant source of molars is joy to anyone except your dentist.

Major Rakal said...

Maybe it's a Bolian thing? I had three wisdom teeth removed (the fourth was fully erupted and acting as a replacement for the adjacent molar which I had lost) and that was quite enough, thank you. And you have twice as many, you poor soul.