Seventeen Cavities

The future isn't fixed

I love to whine and complain. To vent and to rant. To shake my fist at the cruel world and bemoan its inarguable, unjust state of affairs. And one thing I loved to complain about was the dentist. No matter what you did, they’d always nag you about flossing more.

For most of my life, I took pride in my dental hygiene. I was a fastidious toothbrusher because my mom instilled in me a deep fear of cavities and vivid images of a creepy, corrupt dentist in a welding mask, boring into my teeth with a power drill. So, the fronts of my teeth always shone white and bright, and my breath, as far as I could tell, stank minty. As a member of the No-Cavity Club, I never bought into the whole flossing ordeal. The scoreboard reflected a perfect record.

Besides, my teeth were too tight for floss. And whenever I managed to break through, the string snapped violently against my gums, and I’d bleed into the sink. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember—or will myself—to floss before bed. So, I stopped trying, except for the night before my next dental visit, in a last-ditch attempt to bamboozle the hygienist. Wasn’t the point of these visits to scrape the plaque off your teeth every six months? From childhood to my mid-twenties, flossing was just something for dentists to nag me about.

Until, on a rainy March morning, a dentist told me I had seventeen cavities.

My childhood nightmare became reality. Power drills whirred in my mind as I imagined teeth spewing from my mouth and HSA dollars evaporating into the ether. It was the wake-up call I needed…time to get a new dentist!

Whether or not that dentist was right about those cavities, the claim forced me to confront an uncomfortable truth. My bleeding gums weren’t the result of tight teeth, but of inconsistent flossing. I hadn’t bamboozled the hygienists; I had bamboozled myself.

I finally accepted that something needed to change. There were many things I wanted to change about myself, so I read about habit development and scoffed at the simple apps designed to track it. They couldn’t possibly work, I thought. Why record trivial behaviors like flossing?

When I was locked down during COVID, perhaps out of desperation, I started logging my habits. Soon enough, I was flossing every night. The bleeding stopped. My next dental visit went well—no cavities, no nagging. A year later, I no longer needed to track it.

Sometimes I get frustrated with myself, convinced I’ll never make lasting change. I review my New Year’s resolutions and see the same items repeat year after year without progress. I start to believe I’m stuck in a fixed state of my own creation—that I am who I am, for better or worse.

This summer, I found myself standing on the edge of a glacier, fifty miles from the nearest road, flossing. I wasn’t doing it to prove anything—not to keep a streak alive, not to preserve some identity as a religious flosser. I hadn’t even thought about it.

Last night, when I picked up my floss, I remembered that moment. And that gives me hope.