Grind
The word is that I have bruxism.
This saddens me, for lo, I used to have very good teeth. Yet I had been wondering why a lone front tooth had, like a glacier, been inexorably working backwards. A four-years-late trip to the dentist revealed why. “You’re probably grinding your teeth when you sleep,” he says, shortly after telling me that I will need root canal surgery ‘one day’ on an old filling. Having that contrast in my head makes bruxism seem like good news. Still, the tooth doctor also says that if I don’t do anything about it, my glacial front tooth will eventually move so far that it will start interfering with my tongue, which means braces will be required, so he tells me to try a mouthguard when I sleep.
The medical community doesn’t seem to know why some people grind their teeth while most people don’t. I tried to diagnose myself using Wikipedia’s associated factors list and the only match was ‘relatively high levels of consumption of caffeinated drinks and foods’. Does two cups of coffee a day count as relatively high consumption? Anyway, so much for modern medicine, because not only do they not know why it happens, but they can’t cure it – the best they could offer me was the exercise in damage control that is the acrylic mouthguard, which the bruxist must wear at night, every night, for the rest of their lives.
The idea appealed, in some ways. It’s cooler than dentures, but you still get to mess around with something that looks like your teeth, and the opportunities for practical jokes are there. But it’s not as comfortable as it might look to sleep with a mouthguard in – try stuffing the space next to your gums with erasers and you’ll understand why.
And, my brain seems to understand this, even while sleeping, because for three out of four nights, I have managed to remove the mouthguard in my sleep and hidden it in the blankets. This causes some consternation upon waking: the first time it happened, I thought I had swallowed the entire thing without knowing. It’s a miracle that I haven’t choked.
Any fellow teeth-grinders out there?