Fighting tooth and fail

Now, really. Could YOU keep track of all the holes in this smile?

Earlier this month my morning newspaper reading inspired me. I read about a woman, blind for the last nine years, whose sight was restored by implanting a tooth into her eye. Her eyetooth, no less. Her surgery was the first of its kind in the United States.

I chewed on this while I ate my Rice Chex. Wow. Totally amazing. Even more intriguing to me than the surgery itself is how someone even came up with the idea! What -- did the ah-ha moment come when someone picked himself off the floor after a bar fight and realized he could see better? I'm joking, of course. The tooth is used as a platform for a plastic lens, but still, how do people come up with this?

The human body is an incredible machine, and the human mind's ability to become mechanic is pretty impressive, too. This story rekindled my long-lost interest in pursuing medical research. (I ultimately went a different direction because I knew I wanted to be at home while raising my children.) I thought about it all day, even remembering a friend's dad who started medical school when she was a teenager. I could do this someday.

And then my brain got a reality check.

Next morning a crestfallen Elise came into my room to announce that the tooth fairy had forgotten to come.

Aargh! Elise lost the tooth the day before, I mean really lost it, when she washed it down the drain. Upon my suggestion she wrote the tooth fairy a note, which of course was still there beneath her pillow.

"Oh," I fumbled, "the tooth fairy doesn't take the notes with her when she comes."

Elise's smile lit up her face. "Oh, yeah! It's so we can save them."

Phew. I slipped into her room, gave a code nod to Emma and strategically placed a dollar bill hanging over the back edge of the bed. Crisis averted. 

The very next week Elise lost another tooth. I even took a picture of her holding it that afternoon, perhaps willing myself to remember.

We all know where this story is going, don't we? Always the first one up, Elise again greeted me at my bedside. Her sad, dejected face seemed to put me in the pronoun: "She forgot."

There was really no way of salvaging this one. My down-the-hall plan was to slip money inside the pillowcase and hope that our dramatic discovery of it -- See! There it is! -- would overshadow the big fact the tooth never got picked up. The elements were all there: Elise distracted, my "Hi, again" to Emma, her knowing sigh. But there was no pillowcase!

I left the coins anyway, trudged back to the kitchen and hugged Elise. The incident got lost in the furor of breakfast and backpacks. "I think the tooth fairy only remembers when I tell you she forgot," Elise laughed after school. Maybe so, I thought, but when the tooth fairy loves you, I do too.

So if there are any medical researchers out there reading this, could you please come up with an implant to restore my memory? I'd work on it myself, but I'm afraid I'd lose my notes.