The Two Kinds of Decay

Cavities

One day, while I was mostly paralyzed and my muscles were atrophying repulsively, two nurses scooped me up into a hammock attached to a scale and told me how much I weighed.

I’m half an inch shy of six feet, and in the hammock I weighed a hundred and ten pounds, and that wasn’t even my skinniest.

People brought me rich foods to eat, but there was no point. Extra food would turn to fat in me, as I couldn’t move to stimulate any muscle growth.

And the fatter I got, the harder it got for my muscles to move my body.

Not all of the nurses understood this. Particularly not the tubbier ones.

Still, I wasn’t avoiding rich foods. I ate french fries all day. I ate as much as I wanted, which still wasn’t much.

I did care about my teeth, though. Having my teeth drilled seemed an avoidable inconvenience.

And so at night, after my teeth had been brushed, when I was offered a cup of soda for my bedside table, I always asked for diet instead of regular.

And sometimes I got the look. The look that says Oh you goddamned malingering brat, starving yourself to get attention while in the next room there are people dying.

For a while I explained that it was to keep from getting cavities, as I was unable to manipulate a toothbrush to clean my own teeth after drinking a syrupy sugar drink, but then I gave up because of course an anorectic would say that.

Corticosteroids, which I took for a long time, eat away at the skeleton, and it’s not uncommon for the teeth to rot a little. And that’s not even taking into consideration that my teeth weren’t being brushed very regularly or very well.

But it’s been twelve years since my diagnosis, and I still don’t have a single cavity.