Gratitude for Cadavers

Great Aunt Sally May Be Dead, But We Can Still Crunch Potato Chips Together

There’s nothing like a long-dreaded dental surgery to erase a few days from one’s week. The anticipation alone made it impossible to enjoy the last few days before the long drive into the city and my appointment with the dentist.

I’ve been dealing with a lower molar tooth issue for … decades. At some point back in the last century I had a root canal and, unbeknownst to me, the dentist snapped the tip of a drill bit off during the procedure. Said bit of metal embedded itself in my lower gum, under the repaired and capped tooth.

I had no idea the alien object was in there and it lay dormant for many years until it decided to get infected. This was the situation that led to excruciating jaw pain/face swelling during a trip to Paris 6 or 7 years ago. (I wrote about the resulting Tylenol poisoning incident here.)

A Parisian dentist took a look and said (in excellent English and a fine French accent), “I cannot fix this. See your dentist immediately when you return home.” He gave me antibiotics and pain meds and that helped reduce the suffer-fest to something manageable until I flew home.

The resulting dental surgery to remove the embedded metal via the side of my mouth was unpleasant, to say the least. The healing was slow and was followed by re-capping the tooth to try to hold everything together and preserve the tooth.

Had I not been a nighttime tooth-grinder, maybe that would have been the end of it, but alas, my nocturnal clenching cracked the tooth vertically and an x-ray revealed that a low-grade infection in the jaw bone had been reducing the bone volume rather dramatically.

Knowing that I have osteoporosis and that I’ve been treated with a potent medication (Zolodronic Acid), my dentist decided the risk of bone problems after an extraction was just high enough to warrant sending me off to the city for full-on surgery.

That’s how I found myself in a surgeon’s office on Tuesday having this conversation:

“The bone loss in your jaw is significant. If, at some point, you might want an implant to replace the tooth, I recommend a bone graft.”

“Bone graft? Where would you harvest the bone from?”

“Back in the day, we could have taken it from your cheek or chin, but these days, we use jawbone particles harvested from cadavers.”

Say what?!

Apparently, the jawbones are sterilized, pulverized, and processed until the granules are inert enough not to cause any rejection problems but still recognizable to the recipient body as excellent jawbone-building material.

Post-extraction, the cavernous hole is packed full of ground-up bits of donor bone and this helps Mother Nature rebuild a stronger, more consistent bit of jaw into which you can sink a post onto which a new fake tooth can be affixed.

I was simultaneously horrified (I had an inopportune flashback to tipping my parents’ ashes into their final resting place last summer… so many bone bits…) and fascinated (how had I not heard of this before?)

In the end (there wasn’t much time to decide yay or nay), I gulped, nodded, and was whisked off into the surgical bay.

The last thing I remember was the friendly anesthesiologist pressing a mask over my face and saying, “Take a deeeep breath… and, another… aaaaand…”

Next thing I knew I was groggily attempting to sit up in the recovery room, a glob of gauze protruding from my mouth.

Never met a potato chip I didn’t like… Alas, no chips for me for another few weeks :(

The worst part of the post-op recovery is the fact I’ve been banned from eating anything crunchy for 3-4 weeks. There’s a lot of rinsing and spitting going on and I’ve consumed more than my share of lukewarm soup and oatmeal over the past few days.

However, everything seems to be healing nicely and I’m very much looking forward to my celebratory bag of salt and vinegar chips.

While much of the recovery is physical, I’ve also felt intermittent rushes of deep gratitude toward the person who had the foresight to sign off on allowing their body parts to be used for medical purposes. I have dubbed the new granulated resident in my jaw Great Aunt Sally and I wish I could thank her (well, her family) for the contribution she is making to my future chip-crunching enjoyment.

Instead, I’ll settle for a more general sharing of thankfulness with the wider world. Thank you to all the Great Aunt Sallys out there who signed on the dotted line and agreed to help others when they no longer had any use for their corporeal vessels.