Progeria

You know that dream everyone has, where you're standing in front of the bathroom mirror watching all your teeth fall out?

No?

Well I do. Except, once again, the dream has become a reality.

At lunch on Tuesday, I took a bite of salad and suddenly found myself enjoying a piece of clam shell. Which was strange, as the salad I was biting into was a Caesar salad and therefore theoretically devoid of shellfish, but which was quickly clarified when I spit out a small chunk of decidedly unshellfish-like tooth. Which, again, was disturbing, as I wondered which absent-minded salad maker had dropped a dirty little piece of his tooth into my salad, but which was soon also clarified when I looked in the bathroom mirror and found a medium-sized divot in my rear-most bottom right molar.

Then yesterday morning, I was brushing my teeth and *crack* another little piece of tooth comes sliding down the floor of my mouth.

Intersperse all of this with three trips to three dentists in three days - - including one where they told me (me!) I needed tooth whitening, one about an hour from now, and one at the Medicaid dental clinic here at the hospital, which was horrific, and the visual and olfactory memory of which will remain with me until the day I die - - and copious amounts of banging my head against the desk and sticking needles in my eyes in attempting to negotiate my nonsensical health insurance plan, multiply it a few times, and one might get a general idea of how I was feeling by the end of the day yesterday.

Luckily, a band named Heart had enough foresight to record "Crazy on You" in the year I was born, knowing that one day thirty years later I would have a hellish and agitating and tooth-crumbling day and would need to listen to this song and feel a little bit better.

Seriously, try it. By the time all the guitars come in, you'll wonder why you ever thought you needed teeth in the first place.

The upside of the story is that, between my crippled tooth and my prostatitis and my broken calf and my overwhelming addiction to fiber pills and my bad back, it is readily apparent that I will be the oldest gay groom to ever step foot in Wellfleet, a distinction which will surely land my photo below the fold on the front page of the Wellfleet Daily News as I am pulled down the aisle in a wagon, waving to the crowd and getting my frail arm tangled in my oxygen tubing, but waving all the same. Until I get a cramp, which will probably be about halfway down the aisle, at which point I'll need a nap and some Ensure pudding.