A Moment with Gretchen

Have you ever wondered:

Why dentists put abstract art on the wall instead of the ceiling where you can see it?
Why those instruments that look so tiny on the swiveling tray feel so large when they are whirling away in your mouth?
If “Marathon Man” style dental questioning was used by the CIA?
What dental pain feels like if you have really big teeth like a horse?

Before trying to answer any of these questions, I was pondering all of these things while waiting for local anesthetics to sufficiently numb my mouth to allow the removal of a problem that was over 50 years in the making and how different the whole experience had become since it began. When I was 10 years old, more or less, I went to see the dentist but that day our regular dentist was not available so the substitute was called in. Our dentist was a remarkable man whose appearance was large and made awkward by a deformity to one leg that left him wearing one shoe with a 3 or 4 inch thick sole. He was remarkable because of his constant good humor, gentleness in caring for young patients and the number of little dental tools the he designed, patented and used in his practice. I never heard him say the word “cavity”, just “little weak spot” followed by the sound of the drill. All of us trusted him completely.

The substitute never had a chance. He was fresh out of the military and seemed to expect a group of kids to behave like little soldiers. He looked into my mouth and started muttering about not liking the color of one of my molars. So, he started drilling and drilling and drilling and muttering about trying to find the cavity. He had frustration all over his face and even I could tell that something was not right. Turns out that our gentle dentist had noted that there was discoloration to that tooth but did not see evidence of decay. The substitute had drilled a huge hole in a healthy tooth looking for decay that was not there.

At a time before routine dental x-rays, routine use of amalgam fillings and little or no anesthesia for repairing cavities, this was not considered to be a major adventure by anyone but me. I did not enjoy the pain of having a muttering dentist drilling away looking for what he could not find while I squirmed to avoid the painful drilling. I know that there were discussions later between my parents and our regular dentist and that the substitute dentist soon was practicing somewhere else.

The story of this tooth skips forward 25 years to the day that my very adult mouth crashed that amalgam filling through the weakened side of the tooth. I am glad to say that the dentist on that day used plenty of numbing chemistry to make sure that I did not feel much while he crowned an abused tooth. Skip another 25 years and the crown is holding fast but the little remaining tooth has begun to decay underneath. Now with x-rays to make diagnosis more precise than guessing by color, my dentist recommended removing the tooth before it caused me any more pain.

That explains why I was sitting in a dental chair pondering unsolvable issues while I waited to feel nothing except for a very swollen tongue. I am afraid that I never really resolved any of the great questions, but I was able to reflect on the life story of a molar that suffered from being the wrong color. But, what about Gretchen?

Gretchen was a beautiful gray mustang. We got her as a weanling from a BLM auction mostly because she would look us in the eye while she was in the pens. When we brought her home, we put her in the paddock with two thoroughbreds, a young quarter horse, a two year old mustang and a second filly that we got the same day at the auction. All of the mustangs that I gentled took about a week to get to the point that I could walk up to them and put a halter and lead rope on them, except Gretchen. Every time I got near her or even caught her eye, she would move into the middle of the herd to seek protection. She would not even approach when the rest gathered around me to demand ear or withers scratching.

We had to move her away from the herd to her own paddock so that we could get her attention. She was not allowed visits from the other horses and I was the only two legger that visited. It took a week of patiently waiting for her figure out that all I did was bring her gentle words and good things to eat. One morning when I brought her breakfast, she did not flinch or walk away pretending she did not like alfalfa. I put the hay down, walked over to her and let her smell the alfalfa on my hand. She did not move so I started touching her chin, on to her neck but when I got to her withers, I stopped touching and starting gentle scratching. She looked at me and I scratched a little harder. Her head dropped as her neck went limp and her knees buckled. She found out that I could do something that felt really good! From that day forward, she would walk up to me and demand attention for that special spot.

When I got my first mustang, I knew nothing about horse's teeth. When he lost his first baby tooth in the front, I called the vet to find out if that was normal or if we had purchased a defective horse. Since I had seen it already, by the time Gretchen was about two, I knew that she would be losing those baby teeth. The morning I went out to feed my small herd of mustangs and Gretchen hung back instead of lining up for morning goodies, I knew something was wrong. When I approached her, she did not even want to have her withers scratched and kept her head away from me. When I took her head anyway, I was glad that I had developed deep trust with this darling filly because the next step was to convince her to open her mouth. As soon as she did, the problem was easy to see. One of her bottom front teeth was jutting straight at me, hanging on by a single root. I am sure that each time she moved her lips, that remaining root dug into gums, painfully.

Gretchen's Tooth
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I cannot answer the questions that I was pondering while looking at the ceiling of the dentist's office, except for some hint at this one. Big teeth hurt more than little teeth. I remember losing my own front teeth and twisting them off so that they would stop digging into my own gums. Of course, I have thumbs, opposing thumbs that make grabbing something like a tooth fairly simple. Gretchen has hooves which are designed for many things, none of them involve grabbing. I admit that I was not entirely sure that I wanted to stick my hand in the mouth of a horse that was born wild on the open range, but counted on trust and opposing thumbs. The look in her eyes was pain and doubt about what I was going to do next. I held her lower jaw, grabbed the tooth and pulled. The tooth popped free easily and for the second time, I felt that horse go limp in my hands. She looked at me and then lay her head down on my shoulder. We just shared a moment.

When my dentist came back to pull my tooth, we talked briefly about the dental clinic in Oklahoma that had apparently spread infectious diseases by failing to follow normal medical safety procedures. I just put my head back and opened wide to allow her to get to the tooth that had been damaged because I trusted a different dentist. Trust is a funny thing, particularly when it comes to things that really hurt, but after the tooth was out and there was no sign of any the dreadful things that were part of the warnings on the piece of paper I had to sign before she began, all I really wanted to do was rest my head on her shoulder and share a moment. I am not sure she would have understood.

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