Even though the medical professionals urge me to provide Miklos with a nutritious diet, his daughters urge me to leave him alone. And as I said in the previous post, I have no intention of constantly nagging him. But there are consequences to a diet so heavy in sugar. Although Miklos has always had sound oral hygiene, his high sugar intake has left him with rotting teeth.

He has always had a sweet tooth, but it was exacerbated by the pandemic. The shortages on the grocery shelves reminded him too much of the shortages he experienced as a child during WW in Budapest — shortages that left him severely malnourished, if not actually starving. He had no treats of any kind, no cookies, candy, cakes, or even jam for years. It seems as if he is desperate to make up for his deprivation as a child.

The rather devastating news we received from his dentist was that he has four teeth that are completely beyond any repair, and four others that would cost more than $1000 each to fix. One of the options Dr. Moore offered was what he calls the life-boat approach. It means do nothing until a tooth breaks or causes unbearable pain. It was the option we took. One by one, Miklos will lose most of his teeth. Dr. Moore also says that bridges would not be a good option, because as with any prosthetic device, they require time and a bit of rewiring in the brain to be used effectively. It is unlikely that he would have the memory/learning capability to learn the new skill. As a result, he will slowly become toothless.

Already, he has a broken tooth at the front of his mouth that leaves a gap between teeth. I worry that as he loses more teeth, he will look more and more like a doddering old fool or the village idiot. What would that do to his sense of dignity and self-esteem? How would other people react to him?

Then I reign myself in and ask whether I am really grieving for how he will feel about himself, or am I more concerned with embarrassment that his appearance might cause me? I am sure it is a mix of the two.

Being limited to soft food, like pap, can be a socially isolating condition. His near deafness already creates barriers enough to social interaction. Just as dentures require some re-learning, so does a cochlear implant. After a cochlear implant, the recipient has months of therapy, learning new routes in the brain and new ways to hear. If dentures are beyond him, imagine how much worse learning to hear again would be. I am quite sure that he would never put in the work. He might not even be capable of doing it.

I can only hope that the process of losing his teeth is a vey slow one, and that I find the grace to accept the changes as they occur. I hope that his hearing doesn’t deteriorate to the degree that he can’t communicate at all.