August 18 - Jaws

The dental hygienist came in to clean Mary's teeth and she visibly recoiled from the stench of her breath. It hit her as soon as she opened the door.
"How long has it been since your last check-up?"
Mary chuckled sheepishly and pretended to think. "Um, 15 years?"
"Wow," the hygienist said before she could stop herself. Then she told Mary to open wide, took a deep breath, and went to work with the scraper.
The situation was bad from across the room, but so much worse up close. Mary's teeth were the color of milk tea and covered with, well, the hygienist wasn't sure what it was. Cleaning her teeth was like scraping bark off a dead tree with a screwdriver. Every time she took the scraper out of Mary's mouth, it was covered with black gunk. And every time Mary rinsed and spit, there were different chunks of food mixed in with it: broccoli, gristle, popcorn kernels, corn, chipped bits of seashell.
And blood. Thick gobs of blood suspended in spit.
The hygienist was sure that not only had Mary not been to the dentist in 15 years, but it was unlikely that she'd even brushed during that time, much less flossed.
The cleaning took just over two hours, and by the time it was finished the examining room, especially near the sink, smelled like a trash dumpster filled with festering roadkill. The hygienist told Mary the dentist would be right in. Then she left the room to throw up and begin planning a career change.
The hygienist had given the dentist, Dr. Spengler, a heads up about the smell, but it still made him stumble a bit when he came in. He cursed his career choice, told Mary to open wide, and went in for the exam, breathing through his mouth under his mask.
It was like Mary's mouth had been the scene of a shootout using the world's tiniest machine guns. There were holes everywhere. Cavities inside cavities. Her teeth were completely rotted out. There wasn't one tooth in her mouth that was cavity free. Not one.
But it went further than the teeth and even further than the gums, which were rotted beyond hope. The decay extended well into her mandible, and it was clear to Dr. Spengler that it wouldn't be enough to merely pull all her teeth. Her lower jaw would have to go too.
As grim as the realization was, Dr. Spengler was also quite excited. He had been working on an idea for a jaw replacement procedure, and he was confident it would work. The only problem was he had never been able to find a willing volunteer.
Until then.
Mary didn't have dental insurance, so he made an arrangement with her in which he would replace her entire jaw and all her teeth free of charge. All she had to do was agree to go along with it with the understanding that it was an experimental procedure.
She agreed and two weeks later, she left Dr. Spengler's clinic with a new lower jaw made of ceramic and gold, synthetic gums, and a whole mouth full of ceramic teeth. The only remaining member from the original cast of her mouth was her tongue.
Her body rejected all of it less than a month later.
Shortly thereafter, Dr. Spengler tried again, this time with a solid gold jaw, and Mary's body rejected it even more quickly.
And that's when Dr. Spengler decided that his worst suspicions about the procedure were probably well grounded. He would need to use a human jaw.
Not exactly an easy thing to come by, but Dr. Spengler was nothing if not resourceful. Earlier in his career, he had helped pay off his dental school loans by serving as the dentist for a number of state correctional facilities. Some serious behind the scenes, off the record, and below the radar negotiations were carried out with the net result of Dr. Spengler getting one correctional facility he had a particularly close relationship with to add jawbone to the list of transplantable organs and tissues to be harvested the next time an inmate was executed.
As it turned out, said inmate was Tom Hopkins.
Also known as the Butcher, Mr. Hopkins was a serial killer from downstate who also dabbled in cannibalism. Not quite Dr. Spengler's first choice for a jaw donor, but he wasn't a superstitious man, he was a man of science. It didn't matter where the jaw had come from and what it had been used for in the past. The important thing was that it was human and it would work. Even still, he opted not to tell Mary about the jaw's past.
The time came, the jaw was harvested and then transplanted, and this time it took. Mary's body accepted it, and all was well.
Following Dr. Spengler's urging, Mary took good care of her new teeth and jaw, and they took good care of her. Dr. Spengler stayed in close contact with Mary over the next several months and monitored her progress, which was good. She was delighted with her new dental works, and he was pleased that the procedure had been a success.
He also had to admit to himself that he was more than a little relieved that she never suddenly developed a taste for cannibalism.
However, after Mary had had the new jaw for close to a year, the whole issue started to gnaw at Dr. Spengler a bit, and he decided he at least needed to give her the option of learning the truth about the previous life of her jaw.
She thought about his offer for a moment and then said OK.
He asked her if the name Tom Hopkins meant anything to her.
"The serial killer," she said almost immediately. "The Butcher."
And he knew the moment she said it that it had been a huge mistake, all of it. The transplant, the donor, telling her about it now.
"Is this--?" She touched her jaw.
What had I been thinking? Of course it wasn't OK. Nothing about it was OK. The teeth that are in her mouth now were the same teeth--He couldn't finish the thought. In the rush to become the first oral surgeon to successfully complete a jaw transplant procedure, he'd lost all sense of ethics and morality. How could I not have told her?
"Oh my God."
"Mary, now listen--"
"Oh my God."
"I--"
Mary grabbed his hands. "Tom Hopkins killed my sister. He--and now I--"
"Oh my God."
"His teeth--" She grabbed at her teeth and started crying.
He started to comfort her, but instead he put his face in his hands and kept it there until he noticed that Mary wasn't crying, she was laughing. He looked up at her.
"Got ya!" she said and then laughed hysterically.
Dr. Spengler's jaw dropped.
"You should have seen your face."
"Jesus, Mary."
"And Joseph. Ha ha ha!"
He shook his head.
"Come on, doc. Don't be mad."
"Right. Good one. I guess now's as good a time as any to tell you that I've decided I'll be charging you for the transplant after all."
"Good one, yourself, doc. You go pulling that kind of stunt on me I just might have to bring the Butcher's jaw out of retirement."
Then she faked like she was going to bite his arm, and they both laughed.