Remember to Smile

Dates

2022 - Ongoing
Author

Giulia Menicucci
Topics Social Issues

Over time, I realized that broken things are not easy to put back together. In September 2014, I broke my front teeth and years later, due to my dentist's negligence, my smile still hasn't been fixed.

'Remember to smile' investigates the pain of healing when you know something was not done as it should have been. Reviewing those hours spent trusting and listening to someone who should have known what they were doing, and instead of helping, only caused more pain.

Between anger and frustration, this project became a way to talk about those who were hurt and not treated properly, those who were broken and left alone.

With a tireless desire to search for the feelings behind stories and trauma I find myself investigating another story of my life trying to explain and unfold it, to understand and share it.

It was September 14th, early in the morning or late in the night. A friend dropped me off where I had my scooter; we were returning from a party. Nothing special, it was the last summer evening before high school started. I plugged my headphones into the phone and turned the scooter on. I knew the road by heart and there was no one. After not even 10 meters I decided to change the song. I look at the phone. I keep driving. I hear something. I raise my head, but it was too late. The taste of blood invades my mouth.

I think you never forget the first time you have an accident. At least for me, those moments are quite clear in my mind, the frenzy, the shock, the fear, my mum passing out in the hospital, and me making jokes with the nurses. The day that follows is much more confusing, eventually, the fear was still there, I was 18 years old and I was missing three of my front teeth. When my dentist took me into care he told me something that I’ve kept in mind for years, he said: ‘I will treat you as I would my own daughter.’

From then on, I don’t even remember how many times I changed my smile. It was always a small adjustment, sometimes a few pieces would come out, and eventually, that became even normal. They were never really stable, not the way they should be. On top of this, there would always be some other problem that had to be adjusted; I guess I＊ve never been super lucky with teeth. The visits were always too chaotic and too short for me to be heard or even to understand what my dentist was doing. Thinking about it now I believe he didn’t have enough time, but he was too proud to admit it so he just did whatever he could manage in the time he had. Or, as he put it later, he didn’t understand the gravity of the situation. That is even worse.

I never questioned anything, I was young and the less time I could spend in that dentist’s chair the better. I was already going there at least once a week so I trusted the process even if I was not happy with my smile. The years passed by but the problems in one way or another remained, I started to believe that the process would be endless and that I would have to accept the fact that I would have that problem forever and that a dentist＊s chair would be a place I always have to go back to. Eventually, I just accepted everything, in my mind I had the words that he told me the day after the accident so I believed in that.

Then one day, out of the blue, a piece of my tooth came out, again. He put it back in, too bad even for him. At that moment I knew something was wrong. I called another dentist, went to her, and found out that no, it was not normal to suffer and still have problems with those teeth after so many years. At that point, I was 25 years old and the new dentist told me that she never saw anything so badly done to someone so young. The work that had been done up too that point was meaningless barely near the end and aesthetically I was right to not like it.

And so, 7 years after the accident, I was at the beginning again, only a bit older and with some more damage inside and outside. On the 6th of June 2022 a couple of weeks from the moment that I would have started the final treatments to fix my smile, I fell from my bike and broke my front teeth again. This caused even more damage than before and turned me away from finally leaving the dentist’s chair. We are not only other people’s mistakes.