When my friend Rich posted an image of some dental anomaly that made my skin gain temporary involuntary wavelike motility a few months ago, I thought, “Pshhya…. that can’t be real.”
(Yep. Still gives me insect flesh)
Naturally, I put on my detective boots and initiated one of my many brave Google expeditions.
A grueling one hundred seconds later, I was able to confirm that indeed – it was not real. But the image haunted me nonetheless. The dentin dotted gums appeared in my nightmares, daymares, and Walter Mitty mental escapades that account for most of my procrasturbation periods during the day. What if this – or a condition like this – could actually transpire? Could I live in a world like that?
After a week or three, the image dissipated from the shores of my memory. Slowly, it was supplanted by spiders and other things that randomly haunt the bowels of my brain like a Cabin In The Woods-esque mission control is sending them up – one at a time – just to make sure I never have too much tranquility for too long. (Bastards.)
And then – today – I’m here to pass along my internal suffering… via a similar but almost worse story about a f’real verison of that. This kid in India went into the doc after he started growing a second head out of his right side of his face. His parents thought it might be cancerous, so the surgeon put him under and got to work. And what’d they find?
232…. TEETH.
“Little pearl-like teeth started coming out, one by one,” the brave and heroic doctor whose job I could never have done without passing out said before adding, “Initially, we were collecting them, they were really like small white pearls. But then we started to get tired. We counted 232 teeth.”
After a while of nothing but teeth fountaining forth from this poor soul’s face, they resorted to a chisel and hammer to extract a “marble-like” structure in the boy’s jaw. 7 hours and a four person medical team later, this is what they got:
Ya know, I’m getting queasy just writing about this.
So, you’ll have to go to the link those greedy bastards won’t let me embed and watch it all the way through. Because I had to stop halfway. Seriously – I’d sooner watch Salo: 120 Days or relive Ralston’s 127 hours than watch a clip of this 7 hour oral surgery – and all those moutherclacking teeth that came out of this kid’s face.
Why, god?
What horrible thing must this child have done in his past life to deserve this?
Oh… now I see.