My Dentist Upsold Me
Porcelain for Toilets & Teeth? (Messed-Up But Managing #9)
For twenty years, I had a silver filling. It was fine. No pain. No problems. No reason to think about it. None. It sat there, well-behaved, minding its own business, out of sight, out of mind, completely harmless. And then I made a huge mistake. I went to a new dentist. And let me tell you, Mr. New Dentist did not like my silver filling. Like, at all.
It was the first thing he zeroed in on, kinda like a contractor who walks into your house and immediately starts shaking his head saying, “Oof! Yeah. This is bad. We gotta fix this. Let me call in the guys.” Suddenly, we’ve got a fixer-upper on our hands when all I wanted was typical maintenance. According to my highly concerned dentist, my silver filling was unacceptable. Outdated. Seemingly medieval. “You need a porcelain cover,” he siad.
“Oh, do I? Because I’ve been eating and breathing just fine without one for two decades. Not once has a stranger pulled me aside and said, ‘Hey man, I couldn’t help but notice your outdated dental work. And frankly, it’s embarrassing.’”
That’s NEVER happened to me. Not once! Because I didn’t care! NOBODY CARED! The only person who cares is a guy I’m supposed to see twice a year for six minutes. But…he convinced me that porcelain’s better. It’s more natural. It’s smoother. “You really should upgrade,” he said. And I believed him.
Now? I hate it! First of all, I can’t stop messing with it. It’s like my tongue is magnetized to this stupid thing. I wake up, and my tongue is already over there doing a full inspection like, “Yep, still weird, still awful!” And here’s the kicker—I was told it would never be 100% smooth. Yeah, that’s a cool detail that would’ve been useful to know BEFORE I SPENT A GRAND.
Why didn’t he tell me this before?! If I had known this, I would’ve just kept my silver filling like some kind of noble, blue-collar molar. Instead, I am now the not-so-proud owner of Porcelain 2.0: The Worse Edition. Speaking of worse, flossing, something I’ve never been all that interested in, is now even less appealing and more a nightmare. I try to slide the string in, and it gets stuck. Now I have to wrestle it out like I’m trying to start grandpa’s janky old lawnmower. And for what?! Was my old filling just too convenient for flossing?
My silver filling lasted 20 years with zero issues! This porcelain cover? Came off once already from eating BREAD. Bread!!! You know, that famously aggressive food, right? Not steak, not a jawbreaker, not biting into a fork—no. Just a soft, innocent piece of banana bread. I’m just lucky my hard-at-work tongue caught the porcelain before I swallowed it. I put it in a plastic baggy, drove to the dentist, and they did a reinstall of this computer-designed, lab-built addition to my mouth.
This whole ordeal has given me a newfound distrust of dental “upgrades.” This is like when a tech company drops a new and updated version of an app that nobody asked for. Everybody liked it the way it was. Like when Instagram went from a simple photo-sharing platform to “Hey, wanna watch 47 random videos from strangers you don’t follow?” Or when Twitter became X for no reason. My teeth got an unnecessary update, and now my user experience has actually downgraded.
And the worst part? I paid for this problem. Ugh! Literally, I paid to feel OCD about something I never noticed before. I paid to have a permanent piece of porcelain, something I’ve only ever associated with toilets and creepy clown figurines, shoved into my mouth forever. So, congrats to my new dentist. He upsold me. He won. And the next time I’m in his chair and he suggests another “upgrade,” I’m gonna do exactly what my silver filling did for 20 years. I’m gonna sit there, ignore it, and refuse to move.