Wisdom

• Lori Palminteri
• Uncategorized
• September 28, 2022

It was always said since I was a mere elementary school kid that I was “wise beyond my years.” It was a badge I wore with honor. Though, despite my brain and disposition being an old soul, my body developed at a snail’s pace, and I always looked years younger than I actually was.

Alas, I’m 33 years old and I’m teething. Last year, I had a wisdom tooth grow in, and now the other one is coming in (this is the last one, because I actually only have top wisdom teeth). Sometimes I wish I had normal problems that other people have in their 30s, whatever problems they may be. But once again, I’m subjected to the pain a baby experiences, and I totally get why they get cranky and cry. This shit hurts.

I should have known it was coming sooner. A bit over a week ago, two of my teeth felt tight, almost like there was something caught there. Despite habitually flossing, it didn’t relieve the sensation, nor was anything stuck in my gum. Then, my gums felt all around weak. This caused me some pause. What was this a symptom of? Surely, this isn’t a good sign. And it’s not like I don’t take care of my teeth. When it comes to oral hygiene, I’m pretty OCD.

Then, I reached my finger to the back of my mouth and realized, just like it’s neighbor across my mouth, a tooth was growing not down, no, but out the side into my cheek. Yeah. Not fun. So not only is my mouth sore and occasionally taste like blood, my ear hurts from the pressure. It’s goddamn annoying, is what it is.

Though it’s also par for course. I had baby teeth well into middle school and had to get most of them pulled out. My siblings did too. I even remember the first time I went under for a tooth extraction. I was nervous. I had never had anesthesia before. The anesthesiologist asked me what TV shows I liked. “Scooby Doo,” I said. I was a big Scooby Doo fan. While I haven’t watched the gang and their Mystery Van in years, I’m still a huge fan of the mystery genre and stoner humor. Of course, I didn’t know Scooby Doo was stoner humor at the time, but it most certainly is.

It was my fear then, as it is now, that the anesthesia wouldn’t take and I would wake up but not be able to move (probably saw this on TV too on “X-Files” or something which I watched frequently with my parents, promising I’d still sleep in my own bed if I stayed up and watched it with them). Quickly, I drifted off to a drugged sleep, and I did have a Scooby Doo themed dream. While I remember my dreams every night, and have for years, I haven’t remembered any dreams from other times I went under for surgeries (there’s been a few).

Usually, when I come out of anesthesia I’m properly confused and hell bent on escaping. Even as a kid, I remember taking the bloody gauze out of my mouth, confused and convinced I was wrongfully in a hospital and something nefarious was happening. When I had the other wisdom tooth pulled, we were still in the throes of COVID protocols, and as I came to I kept ripping my mask off and trying to leave and this poor nurse had to keep putting a mask back on me and trying to get me to sit down until I was less confused and my then boyfriend took me home.

My recovery from the first wisdom tooth removal was rather smooth. But I took my time going back to solid foods. For a whole week, my diet was equivalent to a baby’s. This is mostly because I am to this day traumatized from my tonsillectomy that I had in my 20s, where I hemorrhaged blood post operation, not once but twice, and literally almost died of blood loss. It’s this same trauma that as prevented me from getting surgery to fix my deviated septum. Even though I still love the horror genre, after hemorrhaging pints and pints of blood out of my face, I now struggle to watch anything that’s excessively gory. Though I still have a horror movie podcast with my writing partner, Nick Griffin.

What especially sucked about losing our baby teeth so late in life was that we outgrew the belief in the tooth fairy. The town I grew up in was middle class to upper middle class. While we weren’t poor, we were part of the “lower income” part of town. A lot of our friends parents made a lot more money than my folks did did. And while we got one dollar for a tooth, some of my friends got $20 for a tooth. I wasn’t stupid. They lived in bigger houses and went on vacations all the time. There was no tooth fairy. This was our parents doing. I think my mom still put a dollar under our pillow, even when we knew it was her.

When my parents moved to Florida, my mom handed me a small yellow envelope. “These are yours.”

Much to my surprise, it was an envelope full of my baby teeth, some of which had roots that doubled the size of the actual tooth. Geez, it’s no wonder these things didn’t come out on their own.

“What am I supposed to do with these?” I asked my mom.

“I thought you would want them.”

“I like watching movies about serial killers but I’m not a serial killer. I don’t want to collect teeth. What am I supposed to hand these down to my own kids? Make a necklace out of them and give them to my future fiancé?”

In a way, it’s sweet my mom saved our baby teeth. Only a mother can love someone so much to save their teeth. Or a serial killer. I did briefly consider some sort of sick prank to play with my old teeth, but I inevitably just threw them in the garbage.

The oral surgeon didn’t give me my wisdom tooth last time. I’m considering asking for it this time around. And pretending like I still believe in the tooth fairy. “I hear the tooth fairy gives you a hundred dollar bill for a wisdom tooth!”

And they’ll be like, “aren’t you in your 30s?”

Yes. And I’m both wise beyond my years and young beyond my years. People can be more than one thing.