Taking the Bite out of One Writer's Mouth

Herald News, Sunday, October 13, 2002
By GREGORY J. RUMMO


     IT WAS EARLY one rainy morning. A man lay prone on his back in a leather chair. Suddenly, a bright light was switched on. It shone in his eyes, blinding him momentarily.

"Don't move or I'll cut your face," the voice warned ominously from somewhere behind the light. Suddenly, there was a faint mechanical whirring, followed by a grinding noise and the smell of burning bone.

Was this a CIA interrogation of a suspected al-Qaida member? An opening scene from an episode of HBO's hit series "The Sopranos?"

No - it was my orthodontist warning me not to move while he deftly passed a rapidly spinning, diamond-studded buzz saw between my lower front teeth.

"I just love the smell of fresh burning teeth first thing in the morning," I joked nervously while watching a portion of one of my lower incisors vaporize into a small puff of smoke that curled lazily upward from the corner of my mouth into the narrow beam of the high intensity lamp overhead.

It was just another step in the now yearlong process of pushing, pulling, bending, poking, prying, stretching, probing and sawing going on inside my mouth to ensure all of my teeth line up properly.

I guess it's a combination of old age and having too small a mouth that has caused the problem principally in my lower jaw.

While many would argue about me having a small mouth, the truth is that there's simply not enough room in there for all of my teeth.

They have been slowly drifting together, pushing each other out of the way like a frenzied group of woman shoppers at the lingerie counter the day after Christmas.

On this particular morning, my orthodontist was literally abrading away the sides of my teeth in a process called reproximation.

It is done to remove minute portions of enamel from the sides of teeth in order to create more space so that they can be aligned properly.

When the procedure was finished, two coil springs the size of the ones that help lift your garage door were jammed on to the wire attached to my lower teeth.

These springs apply steady pressure, pushing the teeth further apart from each other.

In order to accomplish this in a reasonable amount of time, my orthodontist pulled on each spring several times, stretching them to an impossible length, before compressing them back on to the wire attached to my lower teeth.

This was done, he explained, to ensure maximum force (and maximum pain) as I can now attest.

My orthodontists - they are a father and son tag team - assure me that things are progressing ahead of schedule and that I'll most likely be done sooner than the two years they initially forecasted it would take to line up all of the teeth in my mouth perfectly without having to pull any.

Frankly-the sooner the better.

I can't wait to have these little jagged bits of steel and industrial sapphire removed from my teeth. And besides the discomfort, they conjure up all sorts of frightening images, like CIA interrogations of suspected al-Qaida members, "The Sopranos," "Apocalypse Now," and WWF tag teams. n

Gregory J. Rummo is a syndicated columnist. Read all of his columns on his homepage, www.GregRummo.com. 

E-Mail Rummo at  GregoryJRummo@aol.com