© 2005-04 Christopher K. Miller
A World of Pain
My wife slips and falls down the steps from our second floor deck, all the way down, right onto the gravel of the driveway. Yesterday's midmorning snowfall had melted in the late afternoon and then frozen overnight. In hindsight, I should have thrown some salt around. I scream as she bounces along on her ass grabbing at the railings. I don't know what else to do. Then, after she gets up and I can see she is alright, I laugh. Her cigarette is lying on the deck, still burning. I take it to her. "If you were to join the union, you could probably get twenty-three bucks a step for that quality of work," I say.
She follows me in her pickup truck to Tony's Auto Repair. I have to leave my car with Tony so he can fix my wipers which I broke yesterday by turning them on when my windshield was covered with heavy slush. Then we drive to our restaurant. After unloading a new sink and faucet from Home Hardware and a new flipper from Zellers, I leave her there to wait on tables all day.
I take her truck to work. I don't like driving it. Even with the seat all the way back, it doesn't have enough legroom. My underwear rides up and I'm too cramped to arch my back so I can fix it. The plastic windows in the cap are hard to see through. The radio in it is not as good as the one in my car.
At work, instead of programming, I surf and send emails and check my stocks until my youngest sister calls to tell me that our mother will be coming out of surgery at noon, and that I can meet her and my other sister and my dad in the hospital cafeteria anytime before then.
I feel I should tell someone I am leaving the office. So I go downstairs to shoot the shit with the system administrator. He has forwarded me enough porn over the years that I am considering starting my own website. I tell him about my wife falling down the stairs. Then I tell him that I will be having a wisdom tooth extracted after work and why I have decided against a root canal. He tells me that his father had six of his front teeth extracted when he was in the army even though there was nothing wrong with them. Orders are orders. "The dentist was a drunk who liked pulling teeth," he says, "maybe because it made his job easier in the long run." I tell him about a story I once read where an Iraqi journalist had had a tooth pulled for writing an uncomplimentary editorial. He tells me he once read that the Amish sometimes do this for punishment as well. I tell him my mother is having a mastectomy. He tells me his wife has to take Prozac and Methadone every day to cope with the chronic pain of fibromyalgia.
Saint Mary's Hospital cafeteria is on the tenth floor. My father, my two sisters and I sit at a counter looking out over the hospital parking lot through a bank of paneled windows. The sun is shining. It is hot. My father looks old. The windows tilt slightly down, reminding me of a lighthouse, reminding me of a nightmare I had when I was eleven. In it I am in a lighthouse looking out at some birds when a woman comes up behind me and says, "Your mother is dead." I know this does not sound scary, but it kept me awake the rest of the night. Even though I was naked and it was night in the dream, I swivel around on my stool. I keep my back to the windows.
On the way down in the crowded elevator my oldest sister and I argue a bit over what room our mother is supposed to be in. She thinks 347. I am sure I was told 357. "I remember because it is a popular handgun caliber," I say. She turns red and shushes me. I have no idea what is wrong with my having said this. "I think the piece of my brain that is supposed to recognize embarrassing things and control discretion is missing," I say. She tells me that she thinks so too but that she loves me anyway. The rest of the people in the elevator ignore us.
Room 357 turns out to be a broom closet. I comment on the drabness of the hallways. My sister says Canadian hospitals remind her of those in third world countries. "I have heard our prisons are even worse," I say. She was once a relief and development worker for The Mennonite Central Committee. She has spent time in Beirut and Kazakhstan and Washington DC.
A floor nurse tells us that our mother is still in recovery. We take the elevator down to the main floor. Next to a florist, there is a Tim Hortons. My sisters stand in line for coffee while my dad and I head for the lobby. When we get there I am stopped by the receptionist from where I work. We are surprised to see each other. She is there with her two sisters also�both as pretty as she is. I wonder if they laugh hysterically at everything too. The crush I have on her has grown platonic over the years, but she still calls me "brother" to ensure that I do not embarrass myself. I tell her that my mother is having a mastectomy. She doesn't understand. "My mom is having her breast removed," I explain. She touches me on the wrist and then introduces me to her sisters. Their mother is having a mole removed along with a couple of lymph nodes. Their doctor has told them that these are just "garbage cans" anyway. They are all confused. I introduce her to my sisters when they arrive with their coffees.
My father is sitting alone on a chrome and vinyl bench in the dingy lobby crying. This gets my sisters going. When it looks like he has had enough, I talk to him about my plans for starting up a literary website with my son (his oldest grandson) who lives in Vancouver. An elderly, overweight woman in bleached-to-death pastel hospital garb tells us that our mother is in her room now.
Even though a patient is only allowed two visitors, we all go up to see her. She had wanted semiprivate but got placed in a room with three beds. I point out that the difference between a half of a room and third of a room is only a sixth, and that neither semiprivate nor three-to-a-room are at all private. There are some washcloths smeared with fecal matter lying on the end of her radiator. I wrap them all up in the cleanest one and throw them in a linen hamper. Then I wash my hands. Then it is time for me to take an ampecillin capsule for the infection in my tooth.
My mother looks fine. "You look younger," I say. "Whatever they did seems to have stretched some of the wrinkles out." Except for a slight swelling in her left bicep, you cannot even tell which breast was removed. Her only complaint is that she feels jittery from her Parkinson's. She says the pain is nothing she can't handle. I decide not to take another ibuprofen.
I ask my mother how she liked the general anesthetic. It was her first time under. She says the last thing she remembers was saying, "Now I lay me down to sleep." My father says that thinking about her saying this was what got him crying in the lobby.
"And if I wake before I die," says my youngest sister, trying to complete the prayer. "No, that's not it."
"If I wake before I die, tomorrow I get another try," I say. They all think this is a wonderful improvisation. They think it means another try at living.
We spend the next hour competitively completing a crossword puzzle. My oldest sister reads the clues, and we all try to answer. My mother, who usually kills me at scrabble and who gets all of her logic puzzles published, wins.
The surgeon phones the room. He tells my father that he thinks they got all the cancer. Because my mother has Parkinson's, she is ineligible for both chemo and radiation. We are all relieved, especially my father, least of all my mother. She says that she is not sure how she prefers to die. She is ambivalent.
I leave work early so I will have time to pick up my car from Tony's before my dentist appointment. At the restaurant my sink is piled with dishes from both the kitchen and the dining area. But there are only a few customers. The cook agrees to hold things down while my wife goes with me.
Tony has fixed my wipers. He didn't even need to order parts. "I suppose seventy-eight dollars seems like kind of a lot for something like this," says Tony, presenting me with his bill.
"Not if it's raining," I reply.
The dentist looks younger than my son. "It really pains me to extract this tooth," he says. "I would much rather send you to a specialist for a root canal. Is it a question of cost?" he asks.
"No," I answer. "I am on a dental plan."
"Then why?"
I hand him some printouts of research I have taken off the net suggesting that root canals can be a source of focal infections from the bacteria in the teeth and also NICO (Neuralgia Inducing Cavitational Osteonecrosis) or pitting of the jawbone.
"I hope you are not basing your decision on this crap," he says.
"Also, the root canal will weaken my tooth," I say.
"Yes," he says, studying my x-ray. "You will eventually need some pins and a crown as well. But there is risk in every course. I could break your jaw for instance."
"There is more," I say. "When I was a child, I had tons of huge cavities. My dentist hated the needle, hated Novocain. So I had most of them filled with no freezing. The tooth in question alone has probably had ten fillings if you count replacements. I will not even go into my years at the orthodontist. I feel as if I have spent a significant portion of my life reclined in dental chairs opening wide while being drilled, tightened, poked and scraped. I am getting a little sick of my teeth."
"You are suffering from what is known as dental burnout," he tells me.
"Yes," I say. "I think that is it."
"This is a new kind of freezing," he says, deftly inserting a needle in the back of my jaw where the trigeminal nerve is most exposed. "It's called Articaine. It works faster and doesn't linger as long."
We chat while my jaw goes numb. I ask him if he has ever tried nitrous oxide. He says that he hasn't. I tell him that, based on my experience with inhaling whipped cream propellant from seltzer bottles, I think nitrous is too psychedelic to be used as a standalone anesthetic. He says children seem to like it almost too much. The way he looks at me makes me wonder about that piece of my brain that I might be missing.
My jaw has begun to tingle. He checks his watch. Then he goes to work. I can feel everything, but it doesn't hurt much. After fifteen minutes of reefing up on my tooth (which a number of hygienists have told me is going to fall out someday) with various instruments, he has managed to pull it only about a third of the way out. Now he is stuck. "My wrist is sore," he says. "I need a rest."
My jaw is aching. "I feel like Paris Hilton," I say. Neither he nor his assistant get it. "I thought everyone got that email," I say by way of explanation.
He pulls and twists some more. Then he tells me that the way the roots flare out is making it too difficult and that he will have to drill the tooth in half. I tell him that I had been hoping to put the tooth on a necklace. The assistant tells me that now I will be able to make a pair of earrings instead. After he splits the tooth, I ask if it is too late to take the root canal option. They both think this is hilarious. He still has to yank pretty hard to get each half out. "This is the most difficult extraction I have ever done," he says.
We are all relieved it is over. We joke around. I tell him I think he should get paid for two extractions. I tell him that it is my hope that, after this example, my other teeth will decide not to annoy me. He thanks me for being a "good sport." His rubber gloves are streaked with my blood. His assistant shows me how to stuff gauze into the new gap in my bite and chomp down on it.
"How much pain will I be in when the freezing wears off?" I ask.
He fetches me an Advil. "You better take this now," he says. "You are going to be in a world of pain."
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