The Ghost in the Jaw

Posted on February 20, 2004 in Dentition

There’s the pain. Not in the swollen pink gum around the implant — the socket where Dr. D’Almo had razed every vestige of the number 30 molar — nor in the adjacent number 31 molar or the number 29 premolar, but in the number 3 tooth! When you have surgery done on the jaw in a place that is dead, the body screams elsewhere. Number 30 is a vacant lot without the utility lines of nerves to broadcast news from it. It is extinct. So here, in my jaw, I am haunted by a ghost that goes tapping on the walls of other teeth.