It’s not every girl whose household has two major tooth extractions in one year.
What can I say? I live the high life. The first tooth extraction of the year was performed on my oldest child. With that kid less than six months away from heading off to college, her dentist referred us to an oral surgeon.
“Those teeth aren’t a problem now,” he said. “But they will be. You don’t want that day to come when she’s a thousand miles away.” I don’t know. Wouldn’t it be somebody else’s problem if it did?
On a rainy March weekend, my husband bundled our son and dog off to his family’s cabin near Harrisburg. Cowards.
My husband has led a charmed orthodontic life. While I spent seven years – seven – in orthodontics as a kid, he spent exactly zero. A gap between his two front teeth needed correcting, sure. But a hockey stick to the face solved that problem.
For years, our family dentist was the dentist I saw as a kid. He was also, when I was a kid, a practicing orthodontist. He oversaw my odyssey of oral care. One day, he pulled my husband and his perfect Donnie Osmond teeth aside. “Listen,” he said. “You have three funds.” He ticked off each one on a finger. “A college fund, a wedding fund, and an orthodontic fund.”
“Their mother?” my husband asked. “Their mother,” my dentist confirmed. “They both have her jaw.”
In my defense, I’m about 100% British. My teeth are as genetically coded as my love for tea, Shakespeare, and The Crown. He knew that going into our procreation. What I don’t think he counted on was my British dental chromosomes impacting our dog.
Our dog is a fifteen year-old rescue beagle named Pete. When we adopted him – at age nine – he was already missing, aptly enough, a canine tooth from some long-ago hunting excursion.
When I took him for his veterinary checkup this year, she expressed some concern for Pete’s dentition.
Pete had gingivitis, and some bad teeth in need of removal. Orally rehabilitating my dog meant an early morning drop off, sedation, oral surgery, and money. “How much?” I asked. “We’re doing the surgery, obviously,” I said. “But my husband will want to know a ballpark.”
Good news on that front. The cost of canine oral surgery is very dependent on how many teeth your dog needs pulled. Which you don’t know until the surgery is done. I largely adopted Pete without a buy-in from my husband because I have an uncontrollable urge to adopt homeless animals.
It’s genetic – my kids have the same problem. Maybe that genome is on the bad teeth helix of my DNA. So the fact that my husband didn’t pack up and leave, well. It shows how much he likes paying to fix bad teeth. Right?
When I received the call to pick up Pete, I nervously asked how many teeth had been pulled. “Ten,” the veterinary staff told me. Ten. Ten? How – how much does it cost to remove ten teeth? I have, like, college tuition and a car with a dented door and I was kind of hoping to order pizza tonight. Ten teeth? “Two thousand dollars,” the vet’s receptionist said cheerfully as I approached her window. I thought of the gift card from Pete’s pharmaceutical company. It had $35 in rebates on it. Somehow, a $1965 bill seemed even worse.
“Can – can I live with you?” I asked the receptionist. She said no. But I can come live with you guys, right? I mean, I have two kids and one dog with extraordinary teeth. How much trouble could I be?
Contact Wendi Rank on Instagram @wendirank
