Enough drool to make a pool isn’t cool

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/06/2018 (2941 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s official — when it comes to drooling, I am the king.

My ability to produce astonishing quantities of drool was driven home earlier this week when I found myself stretched out on one of those reclining chairs in my dentist’s office waiting to have my teeth cleaned yet again.

For more than a decade, I avoided visiting the dentist on the grounds that I am a major weenie, but that all changed a few years ago when one of my teeth literally disintegrated in my mouth during a charity event.

So now, at least three times a year, I trundle down the street to the dentist’s office, where they put me in one of those chairs that tips you upside down, then shine bright lights in my face, and poke and prod my teeth and gums with pointy steel instruments the size and shape of whaling harpoons.

OK, I may be exaggerating slightly, but that was what it felt like earlier this week as the dental hygienist — who, for the record, is sweet and gentle and treats me the same way you would treat a terrified bunny rabbit — looked into my mouth and made a serious frowny face.

Important Medical Tip — If your dental hygienist or any other trained medical professional looks at you and frowns, it’s generally not a good sign. It is also not a good sign if a medical practitioner, at any point in your exam, makes the following statement: “Oops!”

So the hygienist took some X-rays and inspected my teeth and gums and then relayed a piece of medical news that no person of the guy gender is ever prepared to hear.

“Wow! You are a really heavy drooler,” she told me.

OK, again, I may be paraphrasing here in the sense that she probably did not use the word “drool,” but she did explain, in technical terms, that my salivary glands seem to be working in hyperdrive, and apparently that explains why my teeth are always covered in a thick, gross layer of that hardened gunk known as tartar.

You can probably imagine my dismay.

One moment, you are sitting there, a hip and happening guy, a respected middle-aged newspaper columnist with naturally curly hair and fiery blue eyes, and the next moment it has been made clear that you personally manufacture enough drool on a daily basis to fill several Olympic-sized swimming pools.

“Some people just drool more than others, and you are a drooler,” is roughly what I recall the hygienist saying, although she most likely used the word “saliva” and threw in a bunch of other technical oral-hygiene terms.

I didn’t understand everything she said, but the thrust of her gist was that the more you drool, the more tartar builds up on your teeth, and the more I whimper like a wounded woodland creature when the kind-hearted dental technicians have to scrape my teeth or blast them with high-tech sonic devices.

In an effort to prove I know how to randomly Google stuff, here’s a quote from Gizmodo.com that may shine a light on today’s topic: “Your body isn’t a finely tuned machine. It’s a reinforced pile of goo that spends its day trading off costs and benefits. One of those costs is the tartar building up on your teeth because of the surprising source of your saliva.

“Calcium, and fossilized bacteria, build up on your teeth every day in tartar. (Before regular dental hygiene was a thing, they could build up to the point where they were wider than the tooth.) The bacteria are invaders, but the calcium comes from your own body. It’s one of the many components of saliva.”

I’m going to guess that most of you now know far more about the makeup of drool than you did at the beginning of today’s column. No need to thank me. I’m just doing my job to defend your right to know.

The medical point is that my teeth were once again coated in tartar and the kind-hearted hygienist had to use some serious elbow grease to remove the gross buildup. Had you been there, it would have sounded like this:

The hygienist: “OK, open wide and we’ll make your teeth look like new.”

Me: “WAAAHH!!! WAAAHH!!!”

The hygienist: “Um, Doug, I haven’t started yet.”

Me (turning pale): “I know. I’m just practising.”

The truth is, it should not have come as any shock to me that my rapidly aging body produces enough drool to meet Western Canada’s saliva needs well into the next century.

I first discovered my propensity toward heavy drooling in 2007 when the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre invited me to make my professional acting debut by playing a dead body in a graveyard scene in the opening-night performance of Our Town.

Acting-wise, portraying a corpse is not a major stretch for a newspaper columnist in the sense that we are trained to remain motionless for long periods of time, and most of us have a slightly off-putting smell.

It is far harder than you might think, sitting on a stage and doing absolutely nothing, because, technically, you are dead.

If you ever find yourself portraying a corpse in a major theatrical production, you can expect the following two things to happen:

— You will be seized by an uncontrollable urge to scratch yourself in a medically sensitive area, and it will get to the point that you will pray one of the theatre patrons will rush up on stage and vigorously rake that particular area with a gardening tool;

— You will drool uncontrollably.

I am not kidding about that second thing. Here’s what I wrote in 2007 after debuting as a dead person: “What happened, at least in my case, was that my drool gland went into overdrive, So while I tried to listen attentively… the only thing I could focus on was the fact that I was probably going to be the first actor in history to drown in a puddle of his own saliva.”

In the end, I did not drown. Also, I survived my latest teeth cleaning with only minor bruising to my pride. At this point, I would like to urge everyone within the sound of my voice to start flossing their teeth, but I’m finding it hard to speak, what with this excessive drooling problem.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca