Okay, let me tell you a god-awful story about keeping your wisdom teeth. Instead of going to my high-school prom I went to a science fiction convention in East Lansing, Michigan with some friends from my Star Trek fan club. On the drive there I began experiencing a terrible pain in my lower jaw. We stopped at a Walgreens along the way and I picked up a vial of Anbesol®, which provided miraculous relief! I survived the weekend, but when I returned home I asked my mother for advice.
This was 1976, and my parents were divorced and my mom was on welfare, so I was directed to a clinic on the north side of Chicago to have my wisdom teeth extracted. I took a bus to the clinic in Chicago to have the procedure done after having taken antibiotics to reduce the swelling as one of them had been impacted. To save the effort and cost of further procedures they elected to remove all four at once. I told the staff that I wanted to keep them, to which they said, “fine.” They put a line in my arm and told me to count down from 100 and I think I got to 99. I woke up to being rushed out of the chair, still groggy and barely comprehending that I was done. They piled literature, a prescription for pain medication and a little plastic box with a clear top with my four teeth in it. I saw, with no little horror, that there was still meat attached to the teeth. I was still wildly groggy when they packed me in a taxi. I slept through most of the ride, and when we got to my house I said to the driver, “I have no money to pay you – I was planning on walking home.” The cabby looked at me with my cotton-packed mouth and the box of teeth and said, “Buddy, this one’s on me.”
I went into the basement apartment under my grandmother’s house where I lived alone, my mother having moved out when I turned 17. When I walked in, I was not yet in pain as the anesthetic had not yet worn off. In the kitchen, I took a small pot, filled it with water, dumped my teeth into it and set it to boil in hopes that the meat on the teeth would come off. I sat down of the fold-away bed that I was using for a living room sofa and I fell asleep. I awoke some time later to a horrible smell! The water in the pot had all boiled away and my teeth had become a black and charred ruin at the bottom.
In my anesthetized state of mind I picked out what I could, replaced the teeth in the jewelry case and deposited them in the drawer of a small valet that I bought myself at a railroad auction store.
The smell lingered in the valet for years.