Gap

You remember a few weeks ago when my front left tooth was hurting? Like, so bad that I wanted to rip the damn thing out? You probably remember that Evans and Becky managed to fix it, if roughly. Well, last night it started hurting again way worse than before.

This morning it was so bad that Evans just went ahead and pulled it. He's a dab hand with tiny stitches and knows how to keep a wound from getting infected, so I'm not too worried about that part. Nor am I in pain anymore since he used the most powerful numbing agent he would find. It is pretty strange though, looking in the mirror and seeing a spot where that tooth was.

I know on one hand that it had to be done. There wasn't much chance of Evans or Becky being able to repair the problem since the first go round apparently didn't work. On the other hand, I see my face differently now. There's a piece of me missing that I probably won't get back.

I know there's little chance that we'll manage to find a dentist who survived. Frankly we've gotten lucky to have the medical personnel that we do. I see the gap between my teeth and remember that just a little more than a year ago, this problem would have been simple to resolve. An hour or two of work, and no more gap.

It's the idea that this is such a permanent change that  bugs me. Yeah, I've gotten a good collection of scars since the zombies spread across the planet like wildfire in summer, but scars are something most of us had to deal with before The Fall. Granted, some are worse than others, but scars don't necessarily lessen you. They don't take away. Scars simply mark the consequences of a bad decision, a sloppy mistake, a valiant deed.

I can't help but feel a sense of loss, which is completely stupid. It's a tooth. One tiny bit that won't really make that much of a difference in my life. Maybe part of why it bothers me so much is because I know that in the world that was, I could have had a replacement there even if my dentist couldn't have saved the tooth. An implant or a bridge. Something to give me the illusion that I was whole.

I guess I won't be getting that. I'll have to be careful how I eat. I probably won't smile with my mouth open as much. I don't know if anyone but me thinks this is worth writing a post about. I don't even know if I think it is.

But I wonder: if it were a finger or a hand, wouldn't that be worth it? What makes it so damn important to me? It's a piece of my body I can't get back, though admittedly not one that will affect my survival ability like a finger or hand would. It's just bothering me. I wanted to vent. Sometimes I do that.