In October of last year, I went in to see the dentist for the first time in 20 years. Normally, I take care of my teeth well enough that I don't
find professional dentistry necessary; however, an ancient filling in one of my upper molars finally deteriorated and one side of that tooth shattered
— which was so excrutiating that I finally relented and went in to see a dentist.
Well, before performing any oral surgery, the doc first put my head in a vice and took a panoramic X-ray of my choppers. He came back about ten
minutes later and kind of
chuckled,
"We're going to have to extract that tooth. And looks like you have some spare parts."
Whereupon he showed me the X-ray.
There in my jawbone, a good half-inch behind the last molar on the bottom and apparently embedded in the bone itself, was/is a small shaft of metal
about 3/16" in length, maybe 1/32" in width. Embedded in my jawbone.
The doc asked me how
that happened, as if I could tell him. I honestly said I had no idea what that thing could be. He wanted to know if it
had ever shown up in X-rays before, and I told him that the last time I had an X-ray of my teeth was 20 years earlier, and the thing
wasn't
there back in 1986 (or else the attending dentist would have mentioned it).
The doc just shrugged his shoulders,
Oh well, and proceeded with extracting what was left of the shattered upper molar. He didn't even
venture a guess about the metal shaft in my jawbone nor offer to remove it. Afterwards, I asked if I could keep the X-ray, and he provided it
immediately (it cost $180, BTW).
While intriguing, I didn't dwell on the "spare part" in my jaw until about two weeks later. By that time, the oral surgery had healed very nicely;
yet, I suddenly developed a severe pain in my jaw — now, keep in mind, the oral surgery was performed on an
upper molar, not in my jaw. The
dentist had not tampered with the lowers at all. But now I was having
stabbing pains in my jaw, approximately in the area of the recently
discovered
metal shaft.
Well, it was a good thing I had a half-bottle of hydrocodone (painkiller) left over, and I went through it quickly,
just to take the edge off the
pain in my jaw. After four days of hellacious pain, I suddenly became aware of a sharp point protruding from the gum on the inside of my jaw,
right in the area of the metal shaft. I immediately
thought that it was the shaft itself coming through the surface, so I used a set of
gripping tweezers to pull it out.
Except that it wasn't the metal shaft; instead, it was a jagged, sharp fragment of
bone, about the size of a small sunflower seed.
Now,
this was puzzling. The dentist had done
nothing to my jawbone two weeks earlier, aside from taking the X-ray. I started to wonder
if the
X-ray had, perhaps,
triggered something within the peculiar metal shaft that somehow affected the surrounding bone, causing the
ejection of that painful bone fragment. Yes, by this time I was
definitely thinking in terms of
alien implant.
I didn't mention
alien implants to the dentist when I went for a follow-up examination last month, but I did mention the bone fragment. He
poked around a bit, shrugged his shoulders again, said
everything looked good, no sign of gum disease or cancer or anything horrifying, it was
probably
just a piece of bone fragment that worked its way to the surface.
Duh. But doesn't bone require a certain amount of
breaking before you have
bone fragments? This "dental health care
professional" seems thoroughly disinterested in the implant and the peculiar after-effects of its discovery, which is enough to make me question his
professional credentials.
Unless, of course, my dentist is a MIB or something. I'll tell you, without revealing any more of his identity, his name is
Dr. Stall. Is
that just
too hokey a name for somebody who
stalls when it comes to offering explanations?
— Doc Velocity