i love my dentist. really. you don't hear those words often, eh?!
after too many hours in too many dentist's chairs, big mens' hands pouring deadly mercury into my fragile mouth, i found deanna the dentist. over the years she's re-created the naturally beautiful and straight teeth i was blessed with naturally.
it's not that i hate all men, or anything like that .... it's about the whole health care for profit system, the tradition of men being the breadwinners and the pressure that ensues, the questions i have about those years when the company i worked for offered a dental plan and my mouth was transformed into a metalic mess. was it really necessary to pull all those wisdom teeth? i live with a lot of unanswered questions, and i'm trying to forgive myself for surrendering so easily to the decisions i naively made.
at least i still have all my teeth. poor people often have no choice but to release theirs. my dentist believes in saving teeth, she does everything she can rather than pulling them, but dental care isn't part of the canadian health package and it's not cheap. there's nothing quite like dental pain - isn't it a form of torture to deny people proper dental care? but, that's what capitalism does. if you don't got the money, you don't got the care. thanks to my mom and dads, i have choices.
deanna has a meditation room where people can relax themselves prior to treatment. once in the chair she sprays lavender and chats while preparing for the treatment. to deanna i'm so much more than a set of teeth - i'm a real living person, doing work she respects. deanna's originally from argentina and has told me stories about tens of thousands of people in argentinian streets, in solidarity with their chilean neighbours mourning the cia inspired murder of salvadore allende on september 11th 1973, or banging pots and pans outside the banks when corporate thieves stole all the money and left the country. deanna supports the mothers of the revolution, (Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo), a group of Argentine mothers whose children "disappeared" during the military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983. deanna's very cool and i trust her.
she asks if i'd like music or silence, and then sings gentle spanish songs through the drilling, about 15 minutes worth. part way through i jingle the rattle she's given me, indicating sensitivity, and we decide to freeze the area. when she was finished drilling she provided a hand held mirror and i peered into my mouth to see my two back teeth drilled down to about half. deanna explained she's done her best to salvage the healthy part of the teeth. the black bit in the middle, she explains, is discolouration from the metal that previously inhabited the space. the metal was removed in 2003 and whatever it was that deanna put there afterwards, i think it was porcelain cavity filler, had cracked and needed a more permanent replacement. i remember her telling me this would be necessary sometime down the road.
the area was cleaned and dried and a series of gooey stuff in plastic tooth-shaped containers put into place. models, these, for the porcelain on-lay that will eventually cap those teeth and serve me, hopefully, to the end of my days. i'm now with a temporary on-lay while deanna's comrade at the lab in vancouver (someone, she assures me, she's met and trusts) prepares my permanent replacement.
i've been a bit concerned about losing that back tooth, it's caused some intermittent pain these past few years, but yesterday's x-ray shows the abscess is almost disappeared and the roots are healthy. when it pains me i treat it with clove oil and up my dosage of mercury and wait for the pain to subside, usually a day later, then i go visit james the wonder herbalist. deanna and i have known about this below the surface abscess for a few years now. deanna's done her best to encourage me to a root canal, and i went so far as to make an appointment but on the day that was scheduled the dentist wasn't there. deanna doesn't do root canals, she had referred me to a different dentist. i don't remember why the dentist didn't show that day but i took it as an omen and began to think -- deanna doesn't put metal into people's mouth, and neither does she perform root canals. could there be a connection?
after talking to many people, including alternative healers, i found dr. juan rohan who's touted as a local expert on mercury poisoning. for a year i've been following the vitamin regiment he suggested (a b complex, selenium, zinc, msm, chlorella, vitamin c, consumption of cabbage family vegetables including broccoli and cauliflower), plus homeopathic mercury and lead. then there's the yoga, acupuncture, massage therapy - all help with detox - plus the pre-packaged liver cleanse and heavy metal detox i found at the vitamin shop, and of course james the herbalist who custom builds natural mixes to help facilitate the cleansing. because of some or all of this, who knows which specifically, a surface abscess has disappeared - it's gone from a hard lump to a tiny little pimple that continues to recede - and yesterday's x-rays show that the root abscess is also nearly non-existent. that's two root canals no longer necessary and i expect that, by healing my mouth, i've also removed mercury and lead and the other heavy metals (that showed up on dr. juan's test - arsenic, cadmium, etc) from my liver and kidney and other organs.
in case it's not clear, here's the point -- i really believe that the abscesses in my mouth were connected to the mercury that was dumped into my teeth. it's interesting that the only place it's legal to dump mercury is into peoples' mouths. deanna the dentist has a special license with the city stating that the mercury she removes from peoples' mouths will be properly disposed.
in conclusion, to the dentist who told me, in my adolescence, that my very strong tongue will be useful to me someday, i say ..... is this what you meant? that i'm to tell my story? that i'm to use all the power of the alternative media to tell the stories of the millions of people who live on the streets without any access to dental care, without the ability to consult alternative healers, whose only recourse is to have their teeth pulled from their mouths and die of starvation? to laugh in disbelief at sarah palin's greed motivated idea of socialism that involves taking things from people rather than providing them?
i really am glad to be canadian, despite our collective flaws. this is the country deanna the dentist felt she could safely inhabit. i hope there are other dentists out there like her.
