A couple of years ago, I went to the dentist. I don't go to the dentist very often, because I have no need for their services; all of my teeth are in excellent condition, presumably partly thanks to the evil fluoride conspiracy, and partly because of my enthusiasm for cleaning between them.
(I have now written more about my crackpot theory of dental care.)
This time, though, I suspected I had a supernumary wisdom tooth pushing up under one of my existing ones. That's a very uncommon complaint, but it was the only thing I could think of that explained the uncomfortable developments in my jaw. A small but definite bony protrusion was poking out of the inside edge of my left lower jaw.
It wasn't an extra tooth, though. There just seemed to be too much gum hanging on around one of my ordinary, non-supernumary wisdom teeth. This is a much more common problem, and easy to cure - numb it, carve away the excess, job done.
But my extra-tooth suspicion was partly triggered by the fact that there really was some surplus toothy stuff in there. A little shard of tooth, pushing out on my gum. It wasn't part of the wisdom tooth, it wasn't part of another tooth. The dentist and her assistant didn't know what the heck it was.
It's great when medical professionals peering into you through double eye-loupes say "Amazing!". I suggested they take it a bit further, and go for "Holy crap - what the hell is THAT?!", or indeed "Aaaa! The Antichrist! The Antichrist!".
But I digress.
My dentist's best guess was that the mystery object might have been a shard of a baby tooth that'd just sat peacefully in my jaw for twenty-something years, until my body decided to push it out, as bodies sometimes do. Many people's jaws are in a state of continental drift, as it were, that doesn't tally at all with the subjective feeling of a bunch of very hard things set very firmly in place.
But the dentist cheerfully admitted that she was just guessing, never having even heard of such a thing before.
Maybe a year later, it happened again. Same spot, same funny little shard of tooth or bone or whatever poking up out of my gum. I knew what it was this time, so I just dug it out myself with a pair of tweezers. (Unfortunately, this was before I reviewed the ETime Home Endoscope, which would have allowed me to take fascinating pictures of the little shard in-situ.)
The shard was kind of woody-feeling, not rock-hard like tooth enamel. So I suppose it might indeed have been bone, or perhaps dentin. I presume there's just a little glitchy bit of my jaw that decided to sprout a couple of these things. It's not unusual for a bit of normal tissue to occasionally grow in the wrong place, but it's only really noticeable when it has more dramatic results, like a dermoid cyst.
If I were inclined to believe in alien woo-woo or sorcery, though, I could easily have convinced myself that these strange objects were "implants", or voodoo thingummies, or some other phenomenon of great occult significance. After it happened the second time, there would have been no possible question - the Greys were clearly abducting me, shoving an implant into my jaw, wiping my memory and letting me go.
After the dentist thwarted their plan the first time, they just did it again! Clearly, it'd be time for me to find myself a "therapist" to hypnotise me into remembering the aliens putting the stuff in my mouth, not to mention all the times the witches/ghosts/aliens paralysed me as I lay in my bed, and of course that guy sacrificing giraffes to Satan in the tunnels under the day-care centre.
(Oh, and apparently you can remove alien implants with ear candles!)
Back in consensus reality, if you look closely enough at the body of anyone who's been on the planet for at least a few decades, you'll very probably find some little bits of something stuck in 'em somewhere. My girlfriend's got a tiny grey tattoo in the middle of her chest, under which somewhere is the bit of pencil lead that caused it when she managed to stick herself with it as a child. Anybody who lives an active life probably has quite a few tiny scar-encapsulated bits of wood or stone under their skin. Someone who works in a machine shop will light up like a Christmas tree in a full-body scan; heck, some of them have tiny metal turnings in their eyes that they don't know about, until they encounter a very strong magnetic field.
Given this, there's a very good chance that anybody whose mind turns to thoughts of alien abduction will be able to find disturbingly personal "concrete evidence" of said phenomenon, if they look hard enough.
30 May 2009 at 5:20 pm
I once was clipping my toenails and noticed a dark black line under the skin in the joint on the bottom of my big toe. It was about 25 mm or so long. It was under the top layer of skin but not deep so cut the skin and managed to get a grip on it, it slipped out easily. After some close examination of the hair and my dog it appears somehow a dog hair managed to get imbedded under the skin of my foot. Best guess is something like I had dry skin at some point and the skin cracked, fur ended up in the crack and then healed over.
30 May 2009 at 5:44 pm
The best I've ever had was bougainvillea thorns embedded vertically into the soles of my feet. I thought I'd just scratched the bottom of my foot, maybe picked up a bit of a splinter, but when I tried to dig it out, it seemed very firmly embedded... so I squeezed my foot around it, and out popped this thorn, a full 20-25mm long! Kinda freaked me out... fortunately, a bit of dettol and it was all good. Amazing, really, and quite fortunate, considering that we were camping at Lawn Hill NP at the time - would have been a bit of a hassle to get to the nearest medico (a three hour drive, provided it didn't rain).
30 May 2009 at 8:38 pm
I think this MIGHT just be the first blog post I've ever read that manages to both be about teeth AND mention an endoscope.
31 May 2009 at 2:35 am
Have you had radiographs? That would solve the mystery probably...at the expense of a little ionising radiation. Visible foreign bodies aren't that commonly seen in the various medical imaging modalities, but of course half the time they are not being looked for specifically. Sewing needles, usually broken ones and sometimes fairly well oxidised are not uncommon and often show signs of having migrated a fair distance...one way or another.
31 May 2009 at 5:25 am
This post is useless without pics of said foreign matter.
It is considered foreign if it's from your own body?
31 May 2009 at 5:39 am
*is it...
Sigh. Vodka.
31 May 2009 at 7:16 am
The pencil tattoo reminded me that I have a nice black line along the base of one of my fingers, that ends up on a darker spot. It looks like some sort of weird vein malfunction, but the truth is just that, ages ago, I was playing with a fountain pen loaded with very dark black painting ink, and managed to stab myself in the base of the finger with it. Apparently the nib punctured a small blood vessel and the ink was released straight in the bloodstream, promptly painting the inside of said blood vessel dark. I presume that the ink was then absorbed by the vessel itself, otherwise the blood flow would have long cleaned it out.
31 May 2009 at 8:58 am
I had two extra incisors growing above my upper front ones.
In the roof of my mouth.
Upside down.
Towards my nose.
If that isn't evidence of aliens, I don't know what is.
31 May 2009 at 11:21 am
sigh
[from that Metatech page]
"So if it was an implant (and I can't imagine what else on this earth it could possibly be)"
"Could these actually be water? We have found that a drop of water in the residue of an ear candle look and acts the same. Or could both cases exist? That sometimes it's an implant and sometimes it's water?"
There's clearly just something wrong with the head of someone who looks at those two options, and figures it must be the first.
31 May 2009 at 11:28 am
I have a 2cm diameter cyst lurking somewhere in my sinuses, haven't gotten around to following up on that one...
And I (accidentally), injected myself in the knee with a pencil lead as a child, still there 20 years later
31 May 2009 at 12:55 pm
Wow... many years ago when I was about 14 or 15 I think I had some discomfort in my teeth... there was an object, definitely, I could feel it, and it was indeed not there before. Removal by tweezer (it was stuck fast) revealed a woody sliver perhaps 1/2 an inch long. My father asked if I had been chewing on broomsticks! It was truly odd as it didn't fit the profile of anything I had been eating recently. I still have some weird teeth (I have all my teeth and take similarly paranoid care of them, helped by the fact that I can't stand the feeling of unbrushed teeth), but the resulting closeness of the teeth renders me unable to floss to any degree without shredding the floss.
A friend of mine (A skilled mechanic and a HazMat tech) once remedied an ingrown toenail with a pair of pliers and a pair of diagonal cutters... I wonder, is it those amongst us who are apt to ignore "No user servicable parts inside" notices who are also willing to take our own tools to our own bodies when they trouble us as well?
1 June 2009 at 11:12 am
Again with the metal shards shooting out of people's eyeballs! Ugh, damnit Dan, cut that out!
The comments on this post are also pretty squicky, but at least none of them have anything to do with foreign objects in the eyes.
No, I don't think I'll be checking back, in case someone takes that as a challenge.
1 June 2009 at 12:04 pm
So anyway, to use an ice-pick leucotome, you first stun the patient with an electric shock, then pull the upper eyelid away from the eyeball and poke the leucotome up past the front of the eyeball to the top of the orbit. The eyeball will be significantly squashed by the steel shaft of the tool, but should suffer no permanent damage unless you accidentally poke the sharp point into it. You'll need to sort of wiggle the tool around up there to make sure the point is at the top of the orbital vault, then you tap the bottom of the leucotome with a hammer to break through the bone and drive the shaft up into the brain. You probably want to insert it about four centimetres into the brain before you sweep it from side to side to chop off the thalamofrontal region, then push it in another three centimetres and sweep again, to cut the blood supply to more of the frontal lobe.
It's a bit like that trick where you use a needle to slice a banana while it's still inside its skin.
Any questions?
2 June 2009 at 3:11 am
You sir, are evil. Funny as hell, but evil nonetheless. Luckily for you we (your loyal readers) seem to like that quality in people.
4 June 2009 at 10:10 pm
Well played, sir. Well played.
5 June 2009 at 12:07 pm
I found a small tick on the white of my eye at 3am one morning.
Yes, I could have gone back to bed and gone to the doctor later in the day. But I had an old pair of tweezers and wasn't keen on waiting with a parasitic creature on my eyeball.
It came out first go and all in one piece. I have never been so happy that we get so may ticks here that I've became a master extractor.
8 June 2009 at 6:15 am
Oh, you thought all the tooth fairy does is find teeth under kids' pillows and trade coins for them? Well, what do you think she DOES with all those little teeth, huh? Can you tell me that? Well, according to MY sources, she surgically implants them in people's jaws while they sleep...
Ahem.
Speaking of the Evil Fluoride Conspiracy, Grrrr. In 1990, when I was in tenth grade, we moved for the first time in my life to a city that doesn't have fluoridated water. Some influential people in the community are against it, because fluoride is poisonous. When we moved here, I'd never had a cavity in my life. Never took very careful care of my teeth, and never had a cavity either. Two years later, I had my first one. Then another... these days I have one just about every year. I took up brushing daily, but it didn't stem the tide of cavities. Now I'm experimenting with floss and fluoride mouth rinses, but a part of me screams out, "I shouldn't have to MESS with this if Galion could just join the civilized would!" (Another part of me knows that there are probably other factors as well, e.g., I drink significantly more hot tea now than I did as a child, so the lack of fluoridated water is almost certainly not the whole cause. But still, it annoys me.)
8 June 2009 at 4:21 pm
My body seems to just be a collection of foreign objects vaguely resembling the rest of you so I shall comment upon the bunk aspect of this post.
A quote from (I think) Michael Shermer: I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it myself.
9 June 2009 at 4:27 pm
Jonadab, a buddy of mine argues the same way about Flouride in the water. I'm against it on principle; I don't buy the conspiracy (indeed, if nothing's wrong then the quantity should be of little concern) but I find it offensive that the water bureau or government wants to make my health decisions, and puts crap in the water that I only have to pay money for a machine to remove because I'd rather drink pure water than water Enhanced For My Own Safety. That said, the water quality is so poor in my town that it causes all sorts of other health problems (I live near Iron Horse Park, 'though I'm not sure the two are related), so I'd still by the filter, but it's principle. If I want medicine, I'll take it. The government shouldn't be putting it in my water because it wants me to have it.