Requested Stories

2004/2005

This story begins when I agreed to help some friends move. We began on a Saturday morning in December. The husband had rented a UHaul and we knew we wanted to put the heaviest furniture in the UHaul first. We started with our first piece of furniture: a wood chest. The sky had just started to produce snow. We started carrying the chest up the ramp and as soon as I tried to set my right foot inside the trailer, my foot gave way. The snow had made the aluminum floor in the back of the truck like ice. My foot slipped and I face-planted the wooden chest. I heard a crunch and could immediately feel my broken teeth bobbling about inside my mouth. I was afraid to open my mouth, because I knew that my friend would be horrified. But I also needed to know how bad the situation was. His expression would tell me everything. It did: shock and terror.

As I felt my teeth with my tongue, I could feel two broken teeth...probably the two front teeth. When I was able to go inside, I saw that one of my front teeth was still hanging from a permanent retainer installed years earlier. The other I could spit out into my hand. I quickly removed the retainer and the other half-tooth.

A friend of their family, an angel, set up an emergency appointment at a local dentist and I had the two broken pieces glued back to my teeth. The work done was superb, but these teeth were fragile and would always remain fragile. I debated whether to keep these teeth and about 11 months later (in time for insurance) I decided to have crowns and posts put in, with new porcelein teeth.

For those of you who don't know about posts, this means that they drill/wittle/shave the remaining parts of your teeth and connect them to metal posts. These "posts" allow the new teeth to fit snugly in the mouth.

I would need to try on several sets of teeth over a few weeks before the permanent teeth could be made. When I received the third set of temporaries, with the permanent set to arrive on the following Monday, I set out for a cross-country journey by plane. These temporaries were a little loose, but I could wait three days. Only the permanents would be properly cemented.

That weekend I was to travel from Nebraska with a quick stop over in Chicago before on to New Jersey. I left the Omaha airport too early for lunch so when I arrived in Chicago, I had to run to the next gate and wolf down something. Being a native of Chicago, I had only one option: Chicago hot dogs. I bought a hot dog from the closest vendor to the gate and started eating. Within the first few seconds I knew something was wrong. I couldn't feel my front teeth. I had a bite of hot dog (with Chicago style toppings: relish, mustard, pickle, tomato) still in my mouth so I searched for my teeth with my tongue. Nothing but soft items. I didn't trust my tongue so I spit my hot dog back into the wrapper to search with my eyes and fingers. No teeth. I had swallowed my temporaries.

I was disgusted and threw the rest of my hot dog in the trash, boarded the plane and called my friend Ron for advice. Ron told me to force myself to gag, to vomit up my teeth. As soon as the plane took off and the seatbelt light came off, I went back to the lavatory and stuck two fingers down my throat. I was reaching as far down as I could, gagging and spitting, but nothing else was coming up. I tried for several minutes in pain, eyes watering, but nothing important came up.

When I arrived in New Jersey, my friend Silas met me at the airport with one of his daughters. He immediately saw something was wrong. "What happened to your teeth?" I said "I swallowed them in Chicago". His daughter was scared by my missing teeth.

Even though I was traveling to be with Silas' family, I had already booked a nearby hotel, because Silas' family were already guests in someone else's house. Silas still kindly offered to have me stay with them and told me I should cancel my hotel room.

I told him privately that I better not. "If I see those temporaries later tonight or next morning in the toilet, I'm going to wash them off and put them back in." Somehow the thought of picking my temporary teeth out of my stool in the toilet was less embarassing that going to church the next day with missing teeth. Go figure.

I never recovered the temporaries and suffered through lots of lisps the remaining part of the weekend, and trying to covertly cover my mouth while talking (think George and Jerry trying to fool the deaf woman who could read lips). My permanents arrived on schedule that Monday morning back in Omaha and have been great.

As I look back on that experience, I wish I would have finished my Chicago style hot dog.