Two things have happened since I last posted.
I heard about a sight restoring procedure that has been around for forty years and I bought a new toothbrush.
The two topics might seem inches away from each other and you might wonder how I am going to relate them.
Well, I probably won’t relate them at all, we will see. Oh, yes, seeing.
There is a procedure that uses a person’s eye tooth to support a small lens that is placed on to a person’s eye that enables a sort of tunnel vision to folks who are blinded by corneal defects.
Sure, you say, put the eye tooth in the eye and you can see again, Sally is wandering off the deep end. You say you always knew I was teetering on the edge and now, the pressures of NaNoWriMo and her promise to make her next post a Sally Light, has pushed her head long into a literary or literal pit.
No! I have links. I’ll embed them in the post and you can go see them for yourself.
The sight restoring procedure is called MOOKP. Now, I can see you, don’t laugh, everything medical has letters and this one is no exception. MOOKP translates to Modified osteo-odonto-keratoprosthesis.
You can go there yourself, but let me have a go at explaining it.
I might want to combine the talent of a dentist with the services of an eye doctor and maybe another specialist as well. This is done for consumers who can not regain sight through a corneal transplant. Think out of the box and follow me to the brink.
The eye tooth is taken from the person who is having the procedure. Some connective tissue is taken with it. The tooth is sculpted into a sort of thin and rectangular shape. It doesn’t really look like a tooth when they finish up. The tooth tissue is then fitted with a small lens that will sit in the middle and the tooth that is now a lens holder is placed inside the consumer, in a pocket made inside the cheek in this example and left to culture for three or four or five months. Then the consumer has to let his or her eye be over hauled. Don’t look away. They leave the back part, that still works and they recover the front with this tissue and yes, the person can see again. It isn’t pretty, there are cosmetic covers the client can use to keep people like me from gasping.
Toothbrushes and Eye Care, combined.
I have really sad dental insurance and would really like to find a few thousand bucks, I don’t know, in the trunk of my car, so I can have some work done. What would I do if I were suddenly blinded and didn’t have an eye tooth to spare?
I went shopping for a toothbrush. Yes, I have one, a second generation electric one by a well known toothbrush maker but it didn’t have the goodies even new manual brushes have.
The first tooth brushes were twigs. Not just any twig but in the US they were probably as odd sounding as the MOOKP. It wasn’t untill after world war one that Americans began using toothbrushes on a regular basis.
When I was a kid, toothbrushes came in one size and shape. I remember they were passed out in school. We would gather once a year in the cafeteria, in front of us was a toothbrush, napkin, a little paper cup of water and a thing that looked like the sour cream packet you get with a Wendy’s baked potato. The packet had some fluoride toothpaste in it. We also formed lines for TB tests and polio vaccines in the olden days.
Anyway, back to the toothbrush, have any of you stumbled in to the dental area of your local department store?
There are rows on rows of products and the choices are overwhelming. What is a poor woman in the throws of NaNoWriMo standing close to the edge of a literary pit going to do?
Toothpaste comes in cans like shaving cream now and does awesome things once the power bristles get in on the party in your mouth.
Look away, I reminded myself, I was there to jazz up my electric toothbrush.
The choices on electric toothbrushes were limited and I chose one with dual cleaning, timer, spinner, mover, red light, green light, with replacible ends.
The sounds inside my head as the specially designed gadget does its battering and sweeping are loud. When the brush hits a crown I can hear the difference. While it can’t repair my ageing teeth, I feel confident that should I become blinded by hook or parrot or random literary word slinging, my eye tooth is there and waiting to come to the rescue.
And that, dear reader is the ‘tooth of the matter.’
Thanks for letting me hang out and feel free to leave a comment. And never leave your toothbrush exposed in the bathroom.