The Long Night of the Aching Jaw - The Red Bike Rides in Bretagne, Pt. 5

05/08                                     16:35                     Le Conquet Harbor

My jaw hurt.

   I could not sleep.

    And what’s worse

           I had to pee.

I lie in the bed. I lied. I turned off the light when I heard the door open and a foot on the stairs. A roommate in the hostel. I feigned being asleep. My jaw hurt and I had no interest in talking. He saw through my feint, asked me if he could close the shades and turn off the light. “Of course,” I said, “whatever you want.”

The lights off, I lay in the bed. I was tired; I had wadded toilet paper in my ears against the noises of this or the other roommate. The other was still out and this one quiet, only curt sounds of springs groaning emanating from his bed. The beds were aligned head to foot around the room, six beds or five in total, all along the wall, encircling the room (an extra mattress lay beneath my bed). The mattresses were narrow, rust-colored beds, furnished with a round, long cylinder of a pillow; we slept on 1970s styled (and aged) couches. But the beds were good enough, the room dark, the noise not there, and I tired. I should have slept.

I laid myself down but could not put myself to sleep. My mind was not in and of itself especially restless. It had been a day off for me; I took my time getting from Lorient to Brest. I had a 2+ hour stop in Quimper which  I spent in an African bar run by a white, non-African Frenchman, waiting and watching 100 meter sprints. Once in Brest, I spent two hours in a café in the center, waiting for check-in time and typing up diaries. I had a fine dinner, a drink while I waited for the bus, and then arrived at the hostel at about 22:30, read my Pole for an hour, and went to bed. It had been a fine day.

Actually, I lied a little. Or fairer, I skipped a point. My trouble started after dinner. Immediately after dinner, my jaw started hurting. Usually, my jaw is tense, tight; it hurt. I had eaten steak tartar. I always eat steak tartar when I visit France. This was the first time my jaw hurt after eating tartar (or ever, really, to this degree).

I can hear Amy (my, ahem, wife) responding. “Of course your jaw hurts after eating raw cow! You just swallowed a red patty of uncooked pain!” It never happened before like that, but then, why did my jaw become so sore?

My mind and spirit exist in imbalance, exposed to different levels of development. My mind is well-developed, well ahead of my spirit, so far ahead of my spirit that my spiritual inklings are intellectually-based. What I understand in my spirit comes from my mind. I think my way through life, and through matters of the spirit too. Amy once accused me of having no spirituality. In effect, she’s right, but it’s not from lack of trying. I just can’t get at the spiritual world any way but by working it out.

(My heart steps in sometimes and clouds my judgment for better or worse in individual cases, but for the good overall, preventing me from becoming a cold rationalist).

There are two areas on my body that carry discomfort so casually my mind cannot comprehend them. The first is a knot in my back, just below my left shoulder blade and off my spine to the left. 5, 10, 15 times a day (at least) I swing my torso right and left while standing still, or else dip my left shoulder back, both movements intended to crack my back. I do this on command and more frequently than I should (I just did it, while writing the previous sentence, achieving a crack). I have been cracking my back like this for at least five years, since I stopped wrestling full-time. I remember my last tournament in high school, 10+ years ago, eagerly looking forward to having a friend from my rival school crack my back.

The other area is my jaw. I learned at my first dentist appointment in Israel that I was grinding my teeth in my sleep. My dentist, an excitable South African Jew, seemed to be a specialist in diagnosing teeth grinding and providing biteplates to protect the teeth; he bragged about giving himself a plate, his daughter a plate, and so on. I didn’t know I had been grinding my teeth, but for a long time I had been cracking my jaw in three different places by rolling it clockwise away from my face. I asked him about that, why I was grinding my teeth, and what I might do about it. He said don’t crack your jaw or you might get lockjaw, he didn’t know, and go see a psychologist.

The back pain I can rationalize. I wrestled seriously for 15 years and 10-11 ½ months a year for the last eight of them. I am lucky to have never suffered more serious injury than a sprained ankle or cauliflower ear, and a knot in my back is small price to pay for long years of competition (I also often crack my knees, neck, and each of my shoulders every time I roll either one of them counterclockwise, but there’s no major discomfort associated with these cracks). I remember thinking in my maximalist college training days that I wanted to wake up sore everyday for the rest of my life – in college from the intensity of my workouts, afterwards for the residual damage willingly, eagerly suffered. This is one of those goals that I am now glad I did not achieve. (Sometimes, my right knee fills with fluid, a remnant of a bursa sac injury suffered my last year, and I have a small scar over my right eyebrow from my final college tournament, but seeing those is like looking at my trophy case, a reward from memory lane).

But the jaw pain cannot be thought through medically. The Temporomandibular Joint Syndrome involves the jawbone coming out of its socket partially, leading to the cracking and grinding symptoms. But why does it slip out? Can it be fixed conventionally? I don’t know and I don’t think so. I’m open to rational explanation, I’m downright seeking it in fact, but nothing has won me over yet.

Where forth I turn to spiritual answers. I have long agreed with Amy that my grinding is related to unexcavated grief, mostly related to my mother’s death almost eight (8!) years ago, and also to other, relatively minor things stuffed away in my psyche (or my jaw). This premise centers on the fact that I have not cried about my mother’s death, have only since then cried due to wrestling, physical and mental exertion that could drive me out of my right mind. So now, despite leading a relatively low-stress life and being as happy as I’ve ever been, I still grind my teeth.

At the outset of this trip I decided that if my jaw represents my unvoiced grief, my back must hold the knot of fear and self-doubt that fight to hold me back. It’s a facile explanation, but it serves a purpose. My back is irritable and maybe even more noticeable as a problem, but it and the feelings it represents are easier to put off or confront. I can make my back feel pretty good for a few minutes at a time. The jaw pain always barks.

Once we step off the rational plane and open ourselves to spiritual explanations, there’s much less logic to deal with. So maybe this cow did cry as it was slaughtered, maybe I stumbled on the wrong day to eat cow, which I tend to eat about once a week on average. Maybe if I had gone with a burger, I would have somehow been better off. Less in pain. Asleep.

No matter. As I lay lying in my bed, my jaw hurt. I worried that I would not have teeth in the morning, that dust on my sheets would represent the final remnants of my molars (it figures that I forgot my biteplate in Michigan and was too cheap/low on time to buy another set). I worried that my jaw might look up in my haunted reverie. And on top of my worries, I kept having to pee.

The peeing thing, that’s anxiety. I’ve always been apprehensive of falling asleep, since I was a conscious child. Not so much did I fear my subconscious – I suffered not from night terrors or especially bad dreams  - but losing control spooked me, spooks me. That second when the lights go out is hard for me to grapple with or get my mind around. My freshman year in college, one of my worst years, I had a night where I needed to pee every 15 seconds. Rather, I felt the need to pee every 15 seconds; when I went to the bathroom directly across the hall from me, I peed drops, maybe. It was all in my head. I panicked that night, called my father, woke him up, and then stayed up reading until I couldn’t think, falling asleep around five. Luckily, it was a weekend night and my roommate had gone home.

(My mother was alive and not yet in her final, awful leg of cancer, but my dad and I agreed she shouldn’t be bothered about this one).

I have learned to function, learned to fall asleep. Usually, I pee twice or thrice between when I shut off the lights and when I fall asleep. On my own or at home, this is not a big deal. A quirk, a mild nuisance, but Amy and I are the only ones who have to deal with it, and I think she sleeps ok through it.

In a hostel, it was a bigger nuisance and an embarrassment. I lay on my couch bed, except when I got up to pee. Five times, six, I rose, shuffled down the stairs, out the door, back in, up the stairs, and into bed. I bumped into a water bottle once. I hoped I wasn’t too annoying.

All the while, my jaw hurt and I could not sleep. I tried to address the problem. In my head, I addressed my mother. I told her I was married, happy. I spoke in Russian and thought what a shame it was that I only really invested my soul in mastering the language after taking a team trip to Poland and the Baltics the summer after she died. A trip I paid for with life insurance money. I told her I wished I could have talked to her in Russian like an adult. That I could talk with her as an adult. I thought about how much she would have liked Jeanie, my mother-in-law. I told her that. I could not find her answers in my head.

I lay in my bed and tossed and turned to other techniques, ones I use more regularly. I sang to myself. I sang Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. A cliché choice for my demographic, yes, but still the most emotionally resonant work front-to-back I know (one I heard for the first time exactly almost eight years ago), and I know it just about by heart. I sang through the first three songs, interrupted by two or three pee runs. The technique didn’t stick tonight.

I lie frustrated and worried and tried my last resort short of getting up and reading, of giving up an hour of sleep or more. My most spiritual effort. I reached out in my mind to the voice, the spirit that is ever present in my ear. The spirit I can trust to wash love over my misshapen, knotted and partially detached body, to soothe my woes and worries with warm words and tender touches. I reached out and thought of her, of what she would say, do if she was here. My mind calmed, slowed.

Sometime later I went to pee again, and the Beatles “Come Together” floated through my head, the happy half-conscious moment when control is not lost but forgotten about.

I woke up early. My teeth were still there. The extra portion of pain in my jaw lingered until late afternoon.