Finally smiling with teeth

Affordable access to dental care isn't just cosmetic, it's life-changing

- AISLING MURPHY

I woke up crying. A nurse murmured how well I’d done as she handed me a Dixie cup of saltwater. For a brief, drugged moment, I forgot what had happened — why was I at a surgeon’s office?

The narcotics wore off; the gauze came out of my mouth. In the 90 minutes since I’d arrived, I’d lost 14 teeth.

Yes, at the age of 20, I lost 14 teeth. Four wisdom teeth — a casual enough procedure on its own — plus 10 milk teeth, which for some reason my body had never bothered to eject.

Just a day before, I’d bitten into a baguette, savouring the crunch, the shards of salt in the butter. I’d smiled without thinking about it. I’d had tiny teeth, but they were there. They were better than nothing.

But as of that bitterly cold afternoon in February 2019, smack-dab in the middle of my third-year reading week, I was doomed to a diet of puddings and pastes. I wouldn’t be able to consume solid food without pain for a while, the doctors said, not until my adult teeth grew in properly. (In retrospect, “a while” was an understatement — it was a few years.)

My mum drove me home from the procedure and all I could do was cry, poking my tongue in the holes where my canines should have been. I winced at the taste of the blood.

A week of recovery came and went. I flew back to school, unsure how I’d navigate the remainder of my theatre degree. I was supposed to be an actor — how would that work, now that I could barely speak? In acting classes, we’d been warned of the dangers of lisps and gappy smiles.