Jane thought she was done with abnormal mouth then. She continued to brush and floss and see the dentist twice a year, but she enjoyed 20 years of strong normal-looking teeth. Then the gum disease appeared.

It had to have been brewing for awhile. It was immediately diagnosed when she saw the new dentist. She might have stayed with old Dr. Hall forever but he sold his practice to the rookie who used to be his hygienist, and Jane didn’t trust the youngster. She visited Dr. Adams and asked him if she should follow Hall’s persistent advice to remove her wisdom teeth.

“We can discuss that later,” said Dr. Adams. “First we have to address your acute periodontal disease.”

Jane was beyond shocked. Dr. Hall and his successor had regularly checked her gums for pockets, always pronounced her normal, and then talked about how much they’d enjoy pulling her wisdom teeth, ostensibly because that would make it easier for Jane to clean back there, but always sounding like they just wanted the experience of extraction. To learn that she had some large pockets, two close to 10 mm, and measurable loss of jawbone, well that was news of an astounding and hard-to-accept nature. Jane had no tooth or gum pain. It took her awhile to believe it.

But she had to fast-track her credibility, because the dentist didn’t stop with words. He referred her to a periodontist in the city. Jude came with her for the first appointment, and then kept driving her to her procedures because she wasn’t allowed to leave on her own.

Jane had deep cleaning regularly, surgical planing sometimes, interventions because of sudden swelling, extractions, bone grafts, implants, crowns. She learned to floss with white baby yarn, carry interdental brushes of four different sizes, use techniques no regular mouths encountered. She had her anatomy explained to her. What with root proximity in her upper jaw and a deformed gum line for her lower teeth, her pearly whites (by this time a light caramel in color) were anything but regular. And according to the periodontist, her saliva was like elixir to the anaerobic bacteria that cause plaque and decay. Jem advised her to just have them all pulled and be done with it, but Jem was the extreme sister. Jane agreed with her periodontist that she should keep her teeth as long as possible. Besides, what with sinus lift and bone graft, each extraction-to-implant process would take over a year and cost about $7,000.

As Jane puts it, she has a potty mouth. Or the orifice of Dorian Gray – the only place she seems to age is in her increasingly tender mouth. But she found some silver linings. Her condition often limits what she eats, so she has had diet success. She tends to enjoy the narcotics that are prescribed after each procedure. And her disease produces perverse inspiration for her writing.

She heard awhile ago that Jonathan Swift was plagued and also inspired by a chronic digestive complaint. She read his scatological verse then. And Jude told her that Martin Luther suffered so that he wrote almost all of his stuff while sitting on the (undoubtedly then wooden) toilet seat. Jem said they ought to check the Internet to see if these were true facts, but her sisters reminded her that the Internet got “weird” wrong (or incomplete), and they all knew that whenever they looked at anything about which they had independent knowledge, the news reports – on whatever media – were inaccurate.

So no one looked into Swift or Luther. But Jane has started writing from the energy, angry or dismayed or resolved or mystified, supplied to her by an unremitting cascade of periodontal problems.

And she notes as she types this paragraph, that she’s going to need a lot of practice and a ton of edits. She’ll have to dumb down the vocabulary and crank up the narrator’s conventionality. She’d better expand the parts about Jude and Jem; right now Jane’s teeth are eating up all the evolution and entropy. The whole process is weird, but she’ll have time to work on it while recovering from next week’s extractions.