"For college, I moved to a town that doesn’t fluoridate its water. The measure had come up time and time again in local elections, but the hippy liberal students with full dental plans would vote it down and then move away when they graduated, leaving the poor, long-term residents to suffer the consequences. As a result, the county I went to school in saw twice the amount of untreated tooth decay in preschoolers as the rest of the state. My teeth, however, were managing to hang in there—that is, until I became pregnant...
And we are in pain, actual physical pain—every day. Sometimes it’s the sharp pain when chewing, sometimes it’s the dull ache that reminds you that things are likely getting worse, sometimes it’s the throbbing pain that makes you feel like you are going to lose your mind.
When I finally got insurance and a decent-paying job after college, the first thing I did was make an appointment with a dentist. I blinked back tears as I opened my broken mouth to him and tried not to imagine what he was thinking. The dentist handed me an estimate of how much it would cost to fix my teeth—$17,000 out of pocket. My tears splashed on the page as I read it. “You’ve waited too long for any less expensive options to work,” he scolded me gently. I left feeling, once again, ashamed."
Dentistry, one of the things we forget about access to. I met a guy in a summer research has program who had entered college a pre-med, but switched to pre-dental after he went on a medical service trip and kept hearing people request help with their teeth, report constant pain, come in dealing with malnourishment because they couldn't chew. He recently graduated from Harvard Dental School, and his story has really stuck with me.
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