“You’ve got bruxism,” said my GP, printing out some information for me from the internet.
“No I don’t. How dare you!”
She asked me if I knew what bruxism was and I confessed I didn’t, but doubted I would have an infection that sounded like a bacterial byproduct of bestiality.
Bruxism, with its vaguely Germanic cadence, the first syllable shared with brutal and Brutus, the heavy X in the middle, its accusatory “ism” at the end … I didn’t know what it was, but it didn’t sound good. (Bruxism is actually a condition in which you grind your teeth.)
I had seen my GP about jaw pain. This was February. A month of high stress – TV script deadlines, a collaborative philosophical novel that was failing to cohere, and snap lockdowns that snapped at my heels as I moved between Sydney and Melbourne. Frequently I’d wake up in the middle of the night feeling as if someone had punched me hard in the face. The pain drove me to strange fantasies – what would it be like to have no jaw?? Would I look OK?
All day my face hurt. This was an alienating pain. People talked of headaches – but what of faceaches? I walked around clutching my jaw like a grotesque parody of Rodin’s The Thinker.
Eventually I saw an osteopath. She put a pair of gloves on, reached in and put her hand deep into my mouth – grabbing the inside of my left cheek; a soft, wet, dark place familiar with food but not a gloved finger. It was the oral equivalent of a pap smear. Weirdly violating.
“Aghgh, oorrrff, orrrfffff,” I said. By the time she took her hand out, my chin was covered in dribble.
While I was distracted by the dribble, she held my face and plunged a needle into my jaw, a bullseye into the knot of tension. Now, there must be a German word for this sort of feeling – immense pain but also in the lancing of it a release. At the height of it you almost want your old pain back. You’d do anything for a swap – give me chronic for acute any day – but after the pain passed, I was sure I was cured. I felt great. I didn’t have bruxism! That GP was WRONG – I just had a tight jaw.
I went home and threw out my bruxism information sheet. But for the rest of the year bruxism cast a long, gnashing shadow. It was on the rise. One Melbourne friend said that in 2020 during the city’s long lockdown she began grinding her teeth so badly they split! I ran into another friend whose stressful job in New York destroyed his teeth. As well as dental work, he was steered towards antidepressants. He quit his job and the grinding stopped.
But it was the pandemic that really turned bruxism into a thing.
The ABC interviewed dentists who “noticed a dramatic increase in teeth-grinding related problems. President of the Victorian branch of the Australian Dental Association, Jeremy Sternson, said 2021 had been the year of the cracked tooth. ‘Normally in a year you may see a handful of these patients, but we were seeing three or four of these a day,’ he said.” People were coming in with neck, jaw and face pain, or cracked teeth, with dentists blaming stress as the cause. The “stress of lockdowns would have played a part in the increase in tooth grinding”, said one dentist.
I didn’t think much more about it until I went to the dentist in November for a check-up.
“You have bruxism. We need to order an emergency prosthetic before your teeth disappear entirely. You are grinding them to dust,” said the dentist.
No! Not bruxism!!!
Another alternative treatment to a mouthguard was Botox to freeze my jaw in place. But obviously I needed to release stress somehow. It was creeping around my body in the middle of the night, grinding my teeth into oblivion while I was unconscious, desperately trying to achieve some sort of homeostasis.
I had three more trips to see my dentist while my mould was made – essentially a mouthguard that wouldn’t stop the grinding but would protect what was left of my teeth.
This week I picked up the dreaded mouthguard. I tried it on but it felt like my mouth was wadded up with gum and when I talked my voice came out in a pronounced lisp. The dentist and his assistant laughed. “Will I have to wear this forever? Until I die?” The dentist didn’t answer. I asked him again. “I don’t like thinking about death,” he replied.
“What if I swallow it in the night and it kills me?” I lisped.
As I left, my dentist gave me a parting gift, a sort of doggy bag – the plaster mould of my upper and lower teeth. They were grotesque, the dental equivalent of the Ned Kelly death mask taken after he was hanged. With no mouth, gums and jaw to animate my teeth, they seemed to mock me from their plastic bag. They clanked. Did my teeth really look so chalky and misshapen?
I met a friend for dinner, and when I went to pay I felt the sharp outline of my teeth as I groped in my handbag for my phone.
“Argghh!” I gasped. “My teeth!” The horror was existential.
My teeth are still in there. They keep surprising me when I open my bag. “Hello,” they say. “We you.”
Just as each night I am distressed anew at the prosthetic I must put in my mouth, each day I confront the original sin of my teeth when I glimpse into my bag.
But what am I to do? Just throw them out? That seems worse somehow – disrespectful. And so I carry them with me. The ultimate memento mori, which because of associations I don’t really understand makes me think about death.
