The following takes place a few weeks after Angelina Tarrant vs Shimmerlace I, a match in which Shimmerlace lost, among other things, molar #32 from the back of her jaw.
—
“So we’re just gonna take a quick x-ray of your jaw here, make sure everything there looks A-OK, and then we’ll get you some anaesthetic and get started on this implant!”
“Sounds grand Susie. Thanks a bundle.”
For the x-ray, Susie draped Shimmerlace in a lead-lined vest. She enjoyed the feeling of weight, which felt similar to the weighted blankets she liked to sleep under.
“So if you’d just bite down on this…”
The x-ray machine seemed to involve two components – a handheld gun and a block Shimmerlace had to hold in her mouth. The bit for her mouth was a black plastic rectangle attached to what she assumed was an electronic sensor.
In the ring, one of the worst things that could happen was for some nasty backbiter to shove something in her mouth. Cock, dildo, rubber ball—whatever. Point was it stopped her talking. But the dentist—that was another story. She enjoyed sitting in the chair while a handful of oral health experts stood over her, the light from the chairlamp hot on her forehead. Having to bite down on a plastic bit meant she couldn’t talk, yeah, but that was fine. Wasn’t like there was an audience of cunts here, was it? It was just Susie, and Susie had a cat named Harold and went to the beach on weekends.
“Alright, hold still…and…Good!”
Even as a young girl, Shimmerlace had enjoyed haircuts because it was so easy to please the dresser. Just sit still and let them do their thing. As an adult, she felt a pleasant tickle at her chest.
Good! She opened her mouth so that Susie could take out the receptor, who went on to type something into her computer, and before long images of Shimmer’s jaw were projected onto a screen against the wall.
Shimmerlace stared at the image. X-rays always looked ghostly, to her. Semi-transparent light-gray teeth hung in a mist of barely there dark-gray jaw, except where they didn’t. There was a gap where tooth number 32 should have sat.
“Dr. Patel, x-ray is ready for you in dock #3,” Susie said into a phone.
Tooth #32. Shimmerlace had seen it for the last time on board the cruise ship. It had gleamed on the canvas of a wrestling ring, white and bloody with pale enamel on one end and a more yellow root at the other. She had only seen it an instant, but now that image was imprinted on her mind. Was it actually, though? Or was this just something she’d dreamed up, post-hoc?
She ran her tongue over the exposed gum. The sensation of her tongue over the smooth, firm hump of skin prickled, like a very lowgrade electric shock, since the local nerve tissue—well, for one thing, wasn’t meant to be there at all, since there was supposed to be a tooth, and what there was had been damaged in the trauma that knocked the fucker loose in the first place. All she got was the sensation of prickly pressure.
“Everything OK Ms. Lavigne?”
Shimmerlace blinked. A man in a white coat had walked into the bay. He looked young and had thick, curly black hair and dark skin. He was smiling thinly at her, and she saw concern in his eyes, which were so dark she had trouble distinguishing iris from pupil at this distance.
“Aye…yeah! Right as rain, Dr. Patel!” Actually, her heart was racing, and she felt suddenly grateful that Susie had already taken her blood pressure. “And eh…If it’s all the same to you, call me Shimmer!”
“Right, Shimmer. Of course. Well, Shimmer, these x-rays look good!” He gestured at the image, at the hole in her jaw that had suddenly become the absolute center of her focus. “The CBCT scans we took last time showed we had healthy jawbone to work with. You’ve got a good bite there! Good bone density, which means this guy…” He picked up a metal device from the tray beside the chair. Shimmerlace, trying to ignore how her skin was suddenly crawling, turned to look at it. “Is going to have a solid foundation in your jaw!”
At first glance,
this guy looked like a screw—and it was. A pale, metal screw made up more than half the length of the device. This ran into a reflective metal cylinder, the color and texture of stainless steel, which had a round hole at its top.
“Looks like you haven’t chomped down on any rocks in the last week, so we’re good to go. I take it Susie told you about your procedure?”
Susie had told her about the procedure. Shimmerlace had been told so much about the procedure that
getting informed consent began to have the tinge of a liability issue to it, which she imagined it was. Why couldn’t she breathe though? She concentrated on the count, in for five, out for ten. No matter how she controlled it, though, her lungs felt empty.
“So first we’re gonna get you nice and numb…”
Get her numb, then slice her open. Shimmerlace had a pretty exact idea of the procedure, since she had spent the previous night watching Internet instructional film covering her exact procedure. At the time, she had felt a kind of morbid fascination as she watched the dentist cut the gum open and use his instruments to pull the tissue away until the bone — which looked surprisingly bumpy — was exposed. Then he’d go in with the drill.
God. The drill. For the next little while, she would have perfectly healthy bone in her jaw. She had never before thought about
feeling bone, but now she became aware of her skeleton, of how her skin and muscle was hung on this brittle framework of calcium compounds. Her meat felt heavy and viscous.
Dr. Patel would use two drills. The first was a general drill, not too different from the kind of tool you might use to put together furniture. It would carve the hole. The other was a specialized “shaping” drill paired specifically to the implant they would be twisting into her jaw. Its purpose would be to groove the long, dark tunnel in her bone to match the screw of the implant tightly and precisely.
The more Shimmerlace imagined it, the colder she felt. Her stomach started to feel queasy.
“...Hey Shimmer? Hey!” Dr. Patel’s smile had turned into a bright, toothy grin, and he put a hand on her shoulder. She swallowed and realized her breathing had become…pretty wet and pretty loud. She smiled, sheepish.
“Howdy.”
“You know what I think might be a good idea for you?”
She’d let her feelings bubble too close to the surface, and now the whole room had gone tense because the patient was freaking out.
Just calm the fuck down. “What’s that?”
“Nitrous oxide.” He gave her shoulder a pat. She wasn’t sure if she found that reassuring or condescending, but she did find her breathing starting to settle. “Laughing gas. It’s a pretty common treatment, actually. It helps certain patients relax and manage their anxiety during procedures.” He leaned in and whispered the next bit through his interminable grin. “
It gets you a little high.”
Fuck no is what she would have said if she were at LAW or anywhere near LAW or anywhere near a camera plugged into anything related to LAW. Like she needed a fucking handicap. She could handle her shit just fine, thanks.
But, said in a dental office, all that sounded pretty stupid. A lot of what went on in the ring seemed pretty stupid in a dental office.
“Eh…” She glanced to the side, then, slyly, back at Dr. Patel. “Well. But that would be denying me the opportunity to soldier through the pain, wouldn’t it? Gonna cheat me out of my pain tolerance training opportunity here ey?”
Dr. Patel laughed, and it sounded real—a chest laugh as he shook his head and gave her bare shoulder a squeeze. She felt a glitter of satisfaction. “If you feel so much as a
pinch while we’re working, that means I haven’t done what I need to do as your dentist. OK? So you let me know if
anything hurts. As for the laughing gas...” Dr. Patel unfolded his hands as he shrugged, as if weighing something in his hands. “That’s actually not really for the pain. It’s there to get you nice and relaxed. Lots of people feel anxiety, and…this helps.”
Her fingers were trembling. She caught them and started drumming them on the edges of her seat instead.
“I really think it would be a good idea.”
Shimmerlace sighed. Saying no at this point would be bad. It would let the dentist down and insult his expertise. He was her caretaker, right? If he thought she needed nitrous oxide, then she’d take nitrous oxide. “Sounds stellar.”
“Great. OK! I’ll let Susie get you numb and get you some gas, and I’ll be back when we’re ready to get started! Any questions for me?”
—
The local anesthetic was delivered via injection. It hurt like shit ― first there’s the bright point of pain when the sharp end first sticks the soft lump of flesh at the back of her throat. Next, Susie gives a squeeze. It lasts a long fist-clencher of a moment. You can call the shit pouring into the blood stream a “numbing agent” all you like, but there was nothing numb about the first entry. It burned, spreading out into the tissue and the blood, burned in bursts that made her imagine a web of lightning cracking once, twice, three times before it finally subsided.
It wouldn’t be quite right to say Shimmer
liked the pain. But it was fascinating. It was her way of coping, not to look away or try and clench it all off, but to grab hold of the sensation and examine it. Like a flavor profile, different pains had different, sometimes complex tastes. The
prick of the needle was cold and sharp and localized to one loud pin-prick. Meanwhile the injected medicine was hot and bitter and had a more liquid texture, and it was harder to say exactly where in her jaw the pain was coming from. It was pain that floated and would be hard to touch. Towards the end, her jaw started getting stiff, which introduced a third, distinct kind of pain. This felt like fatigue—like her muscle getting ready to snap.
Shimmer’s teeth clenched around her mouth guard, and she could feel saliva running down her chin. A long groan quivered up from her chest, and if her mouth hadn’t been stretched wide, she would have smiled.
“And…all done!”
Soon, they had the nitrous going up her snout through a plastic pair of nozzles in her nostrils. It made her feel old, like her gran hooked up to oxygen. She couldn’t smell shit, nor even really feel the flow of gas through the tube. For all she knew, the whole damn apparatus was one big placebo treatment. Her focus wasn't on that, though. Instead, eyes closed, she was feeling her jaw and tongue and teeth with all her might, focused on feeling the slow progress of the numbness in all its rich detail.
“How’re you feeling?” Susie was at the chair’s side.
“Right as rain!”
“That’s the phrase you used earlier.”
“Yeah, odd one, isn’t it?” A tingle ran up her lip, fluttery like the surface of a barely disturbed pond. She kept her eyes shut. “I mean, what’s so right about rain, ey? A lot of rain’s left, I figure. Though, wrong rain is less common, I’ll grant.”
“Mmhm.”
Shimmerlace concentrated. Hard. She put the current level of numbness at about a 4 out of 10. She could make out the contours of her tongue, when it pressed against the lip, precisely, and the touch created a grainy, almost painful sensation in her lip. No matter how hard she concentrated on the numbness, however, she couldn’t push away the nausea—nor the fluttering in her gut, or the still continuing struggle to get enough breath.
Fucking fuck.
This wasn’t like her. Occasional spikes of fear or anxiety—she felt them the same as anyone.
Anyone. But this had been going on for like ten minutes now, and it was getting worse. Her hands felt clammy, and she couldn’t stop picturing the empty space in her jaw. It just felt so wrong in a way she hadn’t appreciated until now.
“...I don’t like it being gone, you know.” Shimmerlace cracked her eyes and peered over at Susie, whose back was turned to her. She was filling in information on their computer system, it looked like.
“Mmm, the tooth you mean?”
“Aye.”
“Well, that’s too bad, though I can’t say there’s anything unnatural about feeling that way. Good news is you’ll get a nice new on here before too long. Just a few weeks for this implant to osseointegrate, then we just…” she made a twisting motion with her hand. “Screw on the implant.”
“Yeah…Yeah.” Shimmerlace breathed. Deeply, except it still didn’t feel deep. It felt like sucking in from a balloon full of used breath. Carbon dioxide. Fallow and deathly. “But. Like. You only get one, you know? Tooth I mean. I mean I guess this implant is kinda like getting two, but um. You know, the ol’ number thirty two what used to be there…”
“Yeah?”
“It’s just kinda…kinda wild. Had that sucker for I guess twenty six years and now. Just a part of me…I didn’t even get it back, you know. That cunt took it. God knows where it is now.”
Susie raised her eyebrows at Shimmer. It wasn’t quite real disapproval, but also wasn’t quite a smirk. “You know there might be a kid in one of these bays.”
“Ah yeah yeah. Sorry. Eh. Guess the nitrous is doin’ its work ey?”
She really did feel bad. Last thing she wanted was to disappoint Susie. Still, this…whatever it was that got her heart racing wasn’t abetting. She just kept picturing that empty spot in her gumline. Photograph, x-ray, the YouTube video with the dentist’s drill tearing bone into a fine mist. She squeezed her eyes shut and
breathed. Susie grasped her arm and squeezed.
“It’s alright. Keep taking those big breaths.”
A tear ran down the side of Shimmer’s head.
Fuckin’ Christ. That was the catalyst—the thing that sent a cold kind of shockwave through her body and made her realize something was
really wrong. She didn’t cry, hardly ever. Maybe when the pain got intense, but that was different. Stress tears aren’t real. This was bite in the throat, burn in the nostrils kinda shit.
“I’m sorry.” She sniffed. “I-I don’t…I don’t know what’s eh…” She grinned. “Dunno what’s up. Eh…”
“Ssssh. You’re just fine. Keep breathing.”
Her tongue ran over and over the empty blank in her gums. She couldn’t feel it at all, now. She couldn’t even feel the left half of her tongue. She was 10 out 10 numb now. They could, and would, smash a hole into her jawbone, and she wouldn’t feel it.
“I guess we lose ‘em all eventually ey? I mean, it’s not like this one’s
that special. Sure, I coulda taken better care, but it was gonna go sooner or later anyway, yeah?”
“Welllll.” Susie seemed to struggle with that. She scrunched her lips into a moue while she thought, biting her tongue. “Actually, lots of folks keep their smiles, Shimmer. If you take care of them, and brush, and don’t drink too much pop. And maybe get smacked around in the face a bit less. I think you could keep the rest of these a very long time. Maybe even your whole life.”
“Yeah but I mean after that.”
“After your life.”
“Yeah. Lose all your teeth then, yeah? It’s just. Numb.”
“...I suppose so.”
Shimmerlace did, eventually, calm down. The panic attack subsided after sitting in the chair with Susie’s hand on her arm. This put Susie behind schedule for the rest of the day, but if Dr. Patel minded, he didn’t say anything. During the procedure itself, the laughing gas kept Shimmerlace in the semblance of peace Susie had helped her achieve, and she even enjoyed the procedure. She liked being touched and being cared for while she did a good job sitting still, a good job being a good patient.
The implant was installed without further difficulty, and several weeks later Dr. Patel screwed on an abutment and golden prosthetic. It was not, and could never replace what Shimmerlace had lost—but if she had been able to wave her fairy’s wand and reclaim her old tooth, it wouldn’t replace this new treasure. So she departed Tokyo Sports Dentistry and returned to LAW poorer by many thousand dollars but richer in a more complex grin and a new golden doubloon hidden away in her mouth.
Links to stuff I wish more people would read
Peace, Love, and Sexy Wrestling Roleplay Stories 
