Waterpik

This summer I had an issue with my gums. They felt irritated in this one spot in the upper left quadrant of my mouth. I suspected a red chili flake had somehow gotten lodged up there.

I went to my dentist about the matter, and he gave me a prescription for a terrible-tasting mouthwash. I went back to him when things didn’t resolve after a few weeks and he refilled the prescription. Hey, why mess with what’s not working?

Eventually he referred me to another clinic for a periodontal screening. By then my mouth felt fine, more or less, but the periodontist recommended that I get a deep cleaning anyway. Evidently, that’s when dental pros work to remove plaque and bacteria and such from below the gum line.

I’m awaiting word from my dental insurance company about whether they’ll do me the honor of subsidizing this torture. How strange to want something I don’t want.

To create the illusion of providing a useful course of action while the insurance company mulls things over, the periodontist advised me to purchase a Waterpik. It’s a device with a wand for squirting a high-pressure stream of water between your teeth and, in my experience, down the front of your shirt.

I assume the manufacturer chose the name Waterpik ‘cause the thing functions, in essence, as an aquatic toothpick. Speaking of which, do any restaurants still leave out toothpicks in little glass holders for the convenience of departing guests? What a revolting custom that was. Like, Thanks so much for coming! Now here’s a tiny stick for dislodging partially masticated bits of our beef Stroganoff from your incisors. Do it on the train ride home! Did we mention that these sticks have been out here on the hostess stand for weeks, getting touched and breathed on by God knows who? Put one in your mouth!

As for the Waterpik, the periodontist advised me to use it once a day, before going to bed. So now my nightly dental routine goes: Waterpik, brushing with my Philips Sonicare electric toothbrush, flossing, and then swishing around a mouthful of Act rinse for a good long while.

This is why I never get to bed at a decent hour.

For whatever reason, my teeth are one of the loci of my hypochondria. Chiefly, I worry about things going wrong with my mouth, my genitalia, and my backside. But enough about my weekend.

At various times, I’ve also been preoccupied with blood sugar, melanoma, Parkinson’s disease, and, for a stretch there when I was a kid, rabies—or “hydrophoby,” as they say in Old Yeller, which planted the fear in my mind in the first place.

On occasion, the people closest to me grow frustrated with my health-related fretting, as when a friend once whispered, with startling ferocity, as the lights were dimming before a play, “You know, people don’t always want to hear about diabetes and testicular cancer!”

Acquaintances have tried to cure my hypochondria by reminding me that worrying doesn’t solve anything. But I feel like that’s only a solution if not worrying did solve anything, and it doesn’t: Sooner or later, you’re still going to come down with something. Not worrying about it ahead of time only denies your true nature as a human being, a species for whom “scared to death” seems to be the factory setting.

I do take comfort, however, from a piece of wisdom once dispensed by a coworker when I was flipping out about some malady du jour. “What gets you is never what you think it’s gonna be,” she said.

Which I found soothing because when it comes to diseases, I’ve thought it could be all of them. So I figure that rules them all out and now I’m going to live forever.