Why Do I Keep Breaking My Stupid Teeth? And Other Dental Woes

Full disclosure: if you have come here seeking answers on why you keep breaking your teeth, I am probably not going to have an answer for you. I tried to answer this question for myself, and have only unsatisfactory theories and a bottle of supplementary magnesium on my shopping list. Which I hope will cost less than $11, because that’s how much cash I could find in random forgotten corners of my house, and I now have a metric kilofuck of credit card debt to pay off because of the goddamned dental bills.

a drawing of a skull and some hands sticking instruments in the mouth — Demonstration of ancient technique for fucking teeth

But, if you have come here seeking commiseration — as a fellow tooth-breaker and general dental trash fire of a person, I can offer that. Because fuck teeth. Like, honestly, fuck teeth.

Why Do I Even Have Teeth

I do not want to try to calculate how much money I have spent on my teeth over the years. It would piss me off and it would make me very sad. Especially since two of those I spent a bunch of money repairing have recently been pulled out of my face.

Suffice it to say, I do not have a tooth in my head that is entirely natural anymore. All of them have at least a filling. Some are crowns. Some are now missing, and due to be replaced with implants, each of which cost about as much as an untrained horse. Or an old pony. You know, a budget quadruped.

I have wondered many times why I bother having them. I guess they’re important, to help keep your skull in place, and to eat bread and stuff. It might be harder to eat bread without teeth, I suppose. Although the dentist now postulates that I “chew too hard,” which, 1) I don’t know what the fuck that means, and 2) if I cannot use my teeth to chew things, which is their ONE JOB, then why bother.

a man in a chair grasping the top of his head with one hand and his mouth with the other, in obvious distress — A man in distress over the fact that he has teeth

Still, it seems like I am just not a person destined to like…have teeth, in the long run. Some of it’s probably my fault. Some of it is beyond my control. A lot of it may be a weird mixture of both, and the remainder . . . I have no idea.

The Etiology of Being a Dental Fuckup

So probably some of what causes your teeth to be rotting fucked-up crapberries is obvious. Like bad oral hygiene.

My parents did teach me how to brush my teeth and all that. But, in typical preteen fashion, I realized that when they were no longer supervising me, I did not have to follow The Rules. If I was tired and wanted to go to bed without brushing, or if I wanted to skip flossing, then fuck it. I wouldn’t. Goddamn maverick, and stuff.

This turned into a general impatience with the whole dental routine, which then meant that any habit I gained as a child all fell apart, because all that “habit-forming” shit, in my own personal experience, is garbage. If I stop doing a thing for a day or a week, it’s like it doesn’t exist anymore, regardless of how many years I’ve already been doing it.

Anyway, I do a lot better now than I did as a Young’un. But it’s still inconsistent, especially on all that flossing nonsense. I’m given to understand, however, there are plenty of people who are inconsistent on the flossing nonsense, and don’t have all their teeth stuffed with faux-teeth mystery meat, so there must be more to it than that…

and then there’s the other stuff

Like maybe the sugar. I am a sugar whore with binge eating disorder that was largely uncontrolled until a few years ago. Which contributed, I’m sure, quite significantly to my developing acid reflux, which can also fuck up the enamel in your teeth.

Dry mouth (which can be caused by sleeping with your mouth open because your sinuses are chronically full of snot, like mine, and can also be caused by ADHD/BED medication), allergies, disorders that lower resistance to infection, and genetics can also make you more prone to having dental fuckups. (Like, truly, from a genetic perspective, you can just be more susceptible to gum disease and the development of cavities. I assume one of my grandparents really screwed me over in this department, but I can’t ask them because they’re dead. Probably from having TEETH.¹)

So, I know my mouth is gross, and my sinuses are gross. I also know that fillings do not last forever. The dentist who put in like 11 of them all in the same month told me that they might make it about ten years, which puts a lot of them as due to fail or break off…about now. And I have, indeed, broken off several fillings already, and had to have them replaced with crowns.

But why the hell are the roots of my teeth fracturing so badly the entire tooth has to be extracted? Like, multiple times? In the same year? In my thirties?

The (Non-)Etiology of Breaking My Stupid Teeth

I asked the dentist this, and he said either I am eating things that are too hard, or I am chewing too hard, and/or my bones are now stronger than my teeth. I would kind of buy that my teeth are turning into gelatinous marshmallows, honestly, because it kind of fits in with everything else, but that is apparently not what he meant by that. Not sure if that’s a thing.

some old-timey people in an old-timey bedroom, where a woman sits in a chair and a man in a wig is pulling a tooth from her mouth — Classic victim of gnawing on raw cow femurs and hoof nails

Frankly, I don’t buy the “chewing too hard” or “eating things that are too hard” thing. So I tried to look it up myself. And what I found is that for the most part, the scholarly answers to the question “what are the possible causes for a tooth root breaking?” are pretty much the same as what any random person on the street would come up with: trauma, chewing or biting hard things, tooth grinding and clenching, and old age (“wear and tear”).

There was, however, the revelation that root canals and coronal restorations (“getting crowns put on”) can weaken the tooth root, or make it more brittle and prone to fracture. I haven’t had a root canal, but both of the tooth roots that I broke were ones that had crowns. So there’s that, I guess.

zeroing in on the non-answer

But what pressures caused the fractures to happen? I don’t go around gnawing on raw cow femurs and hoof nails, and I haven’t been punched in the face in a really long time. I’m not young anymore, but I’m not quite old enough for “wear and tear” to result in random tooth breakage.

That leaves clenching my jaw and/or grinding my teeth without knowing it, or Mystery Option X, “syndrome yet to be discovered that causes teeth to turn into gelatinous marshmallows.”

However, because the tooth clenching/grinding without knowing it is, by definition, without my knowledge…it could totally be that. It is true also that ADHD is associated with higher incidences of bruxism (tooth grinding) and jaw clenching, possibly because it is fucking stressful to have ADHD. The medications used to treat ADHD may also, themselves, increase the chances of this happening.

It has been said, though, that a magnesium supplement may help with this (although I don’t know how well-tested it is, but, yanno, why not try I guess), and also potentially wearing a night guard if it’s happening at night. So, I suppose a little more magnesium in my life couldn’t hurt. And, once the financial sting of the past week has subsided, maybe a clump of plastic in my mouth.

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¹Kidding. It was mostly strokes and heart attacks. But who can say if the teeth were in there mixing up ischemia-juice in their spare time, like the frickin Weird Sisters over a cauldron?