Dental Adventals, er, Adventures in Dentures, Oh Nevermind

OK, I don't have dentures, but it rhymed. I do have porcelain veneers on my front teeth, though, so that's some partially fake teeth. Those go back to my preoccupation with my ugly gapped teeth when I was a preteen. In hindsight, I should have left them, but I didn't. Now I have fake front teeth. If one of my veneers breaks, a really ugly brown fang is left behind. This is an attractive look, especially when one has college interviews. Ask me how I know about this.

Anyway, Saturday I had a dentist appointment. Always such a fun time. Really, if you don't count the big chunks of plastic jammed into your mouth for x-rays, the painful tartar scraping (especially painful when the tartar is beneath the gum line between teeth), or the gag-inducing effects of tooth polishing grit landing in the back of your throat, it's a pretty good time. Relaxing with some nice shades on, enjoying one-sided small talk with the hygeniest: "Your gums look great on this side. You really have no recession at all!" Me: "Guhhhrgggh." Yeah, good times.

Then after the scraping, bleeding, rinsing, sucking, flossing, bleeding, rinsing, sucking, grinding, polishing, and final rising and sucking, the dentist came in to do the once over, while telling me about the blessings of having teeth in such good shape. His parents, he informed me, were from England, and had dentures by the time they were in their 20s. He told me they saw getting dentures as a rite of passage into adulthood. This was back in the 1920s, but still...And I thought that whole British=bad teeth was just a stereotype. Well, back in the day. Our British friends have fine teeth now. Really. Please no angry comments. This was my dentist who said this, and he's probably a tooth snob. Can you be a tooth racist if you're one generation removed?

After my torture appointment, I set up a time to take the boys in. Neither of them has ever been to a dentist. Yes, I'm a horrible mother, but you should have known that from the previous 130 posts. I've been using the Autism excuse for not bringing Hutton. Harrison is probably a little too young, but I'm going to take them both in, and hope Hutton's teeth aren't rotting out. They're only baby teeth, right? He's a very good tooth-brusher actually, so fingers crossed.

TMI WARNING!
Don't read below if you don't like gross things about people's mouths. Well, even more gross things about people's mouths.

Not really tooth related, but orally fixated is the next topic: TONSILOLITHS.
Sound monolithic, palaeolithic, or even xenolithic, but they just suck. I complained to the dental hygeniest about having what felt like a piece of food lodged in my tonsil, and she told me it was a plugged salivary duct that would go away on its own. I didn't buy that, but forgot to ask the dentist, and of course had to rule out some weird disease that would lead to my mouth rotting away, and the best way to rule out weird diseases is by finding stuff online, you know!

So, after my research, I now know I have a TONSILOLITH in my TONSIL CRYPT, or at least that's what I've discovered through the magic of the internet. All this time, I didn't realize I needed a tonsilar crypt keeper in there, but I guess I do.
Here's why: TONSILOLITHS, or Tonsil Stones (hence the lith part), "are tiny, white, foul smelling stones which lodge in the tonsilar crypts. Sometimes a tonsolith can be pried out of the surface of the tonsil with a pencil or other small pointed instrument leaving what appears to be a little 'hole' but is, in actuality, the tonsilar crypt in which it originally formed. Tonsiloliths sometimes give the feeling of something lodged in the throat. They can also contribute to bad breath. Some people have chronic problems with tonsiloliths. The only sure treatment for chronic tonsiloliths is removal of the tonsils."

One website said that tonsilolith are from post-nasal drip, but another said they are from little pieces of food that get caught in the tonsil, and then this hard, white stone coats it, like a pearl being formed by a grain of sand in an oyster. Except the pearl is quite beautiful and rare, not a disgusting, sulfurous glob that is hacked up from the back of one's throat.

So, now I know that I have a tonsilolith, but I don't really want to use a pencil in my mouth. I do have a random chopstick on my desk though....

Off to dig around in my tonsil crypts. My Saturday night is rocking!

Update: My tonsil stone is gone. I know you're all relieved.

This ends the TMI portion of this post. Oh, that's the end of the post all together. Oh well.