Root Canals, Migraines, and Trevor Noah

Before we moved to Hong Kong the first time, Michael and I visited the dentist to get our pearly whites polished.

Neither of us had new cavities, but the dentist our Disney-provided medical insurance assigned to us freaked out upon seeing all the silver fillings we had. She all but demanded we have them removed and replaced with white, composite fillings. She gave us a long list of all the ways our health was at grave and immediate risk if we didn't get those evil mercury-laden poisonous death bombs removed right away.

It was 2004 and Google had only been in common household use for a year and at the time there was no real way to know if she was right to be alarmed or if we could have safely held off on losing the metal. We just trusted that the dentist, with the title of doctor before her name and lots and lots of diplomas and certificates on the wall, knew what she was talking about.

I went first, and was immediately shocked by the way she shouted at her assistant, a visibly pregnant younger woman who became jittery and tearful. She struggled to remove the perfectly fitted silver fillings I'd had since late childhood, grinding out more and more of each surrounding tooth to get it all before filling it with white composite. The pain throughout my mouth and jaw was intense and I was quite shaken by the experience. I went home to watch our small children when it was Michael's turn, and when I returned to pick him up at the curb in front of the office, he was holding back tears. His face was red and swollen, with blood dribbling off his numb lips, his experience just as bad as my own. The dentist had wanted to see our oldest son for a cleaning, but after the absolute butchering she had subjected us to, there was no possible way I was letting her anywhere near my sensitive four year old!

Later it became more common knowledge that silver fillings really only need to be removed if they are loose, if your tooth has cracked, or if you have a reaction to them, so everything we'd gone through at that time was unnecessary. And worse, it has caused me nothing but problems since then. All my composite fillings have failed. They have cracked, become loose, or the tooth that they were in had so little tooth remaining after she carved a giant hollow in it that the tooth itself crumbled. In every case, because the new fillings were not a perfect fit, new cavities formed beneath them, generally causing massive infections in the roots. It has been an ongoing nightmare which continues to this very week.

I had my first root canal ten years ago in Shanghai.

There was not much tooth to save, so they had to clear out the roots and give me a crown. We were on a local employment package rather than a fancy expat package, so I saw a somewhat local dentist who did the root canal with no numbing or pain meds. As if I didn't have enough dental-related trauma! But this time my kids were old enough to be left at home and Michael came with me, sitting in the corner and holding onto my ankle so I wasn't alone. He repeated this as each subsequent composite filling failed over the last decade, taking the day off work to be there by my feet, holding my ankle while I tried to deep breathe through the awfulness (which thankfully has always included numbing in Hong Kong!). My last one was in 2023 and at the time my endodontist had warned me there was an upper molar which was likely going to be next.

A couple weeks ago, my face exploded in pain and I knew it was time. My dentist was on vacation, so I booked an appointment for the day of his return and took the leftover anti-inflammatory pills from my last root canal to manage the pain. I cried a lot, not just from the pain but from the realisation that Michael was not going to be able to accompany me to the appointment. My still-sensitive older son was deeply affected by my clear distress and offered to stand in for his dad, to come sit in the corner and hold my ankle. Yes, I said, please come with me, don't make me face this alone.

So last Friday I went in for my first dental procedure without Michael. I told my dentist that my husband had died and that it was really challenging for me to face this, and that is why my son was there instead. He was kind and gentle and I will be completely honest and say it was nowhere near as bad as I feared it would be. Time flew by, my son never let go, and each time a small bit of panic would rise, I'd feel for Michael's wedding ring on my thumb and remind myself of the many other things I've already survived in just the last year. I was very likely to survive this as well.

On Monday I met a friend in town from Australia for coffee before I'd planned to head to a doctor appointment in Kowloon.

While chatting with my friend, I noticed the vision in my right eye would sort of... disappear. I'd see the table to my right and then suddenly there'd be a fuzzy black hole there instead. It was strange. I had time before my appointment so I decided to head back home for a bit. While walking, I noticed the vision was getting worse, and like a thunderbolt I recognised it as a precursor to a migraine headache known as an aura. Halfway home I called the doctor's office and said I would not be coming in, because I knew what was coming next. I made it in the door just as the pain began. I dug through my meds to find my prescription migraine pills, filled a giant tumbler with ice water and quickly told my sons I was going to be down-and-out for the rest of the day, if not the following day as well. I climbed back into my pyjamas, pulled the room-darkening shades, and turned the air conditioning down low as the pain enveloped my head and nausea wracked my body.

I've had chronic migraines since the third grade. Through the years their frequency has waxed and waned. The peak hit two years before I got pregnant with our first son, when I would have two or more a month and needed to give myself a shot to combat them. I worked hard to identify and then remove all triggers (chocolate is my worst offender) and stay on top of prescription meds the moment I feel a hint of pain. But mostly I've had to just ride the terrible wave of migraine headaches which often last 48-72 hours and knock me out completely. Michael was always the best at caring for me when they'd hit. It didn't matter what he had going on, he'd drop everything else to take care of me, stepping in to manage all that I would not be able to do for a few days while I laid in a cool, quiet, dark room between gingerly walking to the bathroom to vomit.

On Monday I desperately wanted to cry, but the pain was too intense to even open my eyes. I would voice text my sons bring more water or please take dog and they would quietly sneak into my room to take care of what I needed. Together, without me saying anything, my older son took care of the rest of the laundry and took out the trash while Benjamin ran to the grocery store to get the ingredients to make a complicated dinner from scratch using a recipe I had in the kitchen, did all the dishes and cleaned the kitchen. The migraine was horrible, but everything else? I expected to surface from my cloud of visionless suffering the next day to find all my neglected tasks piled up and waiting for me. Instead, everything was as neat and tidy as it would be if Michael himself were here to do it. By Wednesday evening I finally felt well enough to leave the house for a long planned event.

Root canal, migraine... So how does Trevor Noah come in to this?

During the pandemic when were all stuck at home, Trevor Noah began remotely hosting The Daily Show from his NYC apartment. Five days a week he'd somehow bring levity to the heaviness we were all feeling around the world. Michael and I watched his show or clips of him every day, talking back to the TV like we were in conversation with him. He often spoke about how people would see him on the street and strike up a conversation. He said his favourite interactions were with people who didn't ask for a selfie. I told Michael that I was absolutely certain there'd come a day when we'd be in New York and bump into him and I would say hey Trevor Noah, good to see you but not take a photo.

The pandemic ended, Trevor Noah went back to the studio with his regular format, and we stopped watching. We missed the strange faux intimacy of talking with him from our living room while he was in his own living room, like a zoom call with a casual friend who got us through the worst of isolation. We got the audiobook of his autobiography, Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood, and we laughed our way through it. He left The Daily Show and started touring, and we said if he ever came to Hong Kong we'd go see him. But Trevor Noah had never been to Hong Kong and who knew if there was actually a large enough fan base here to entice him to add a stop.

On Michael's birthday in September, Trevor Noah appeared in my Instagram feed. He was coming to Asia and hitting Hong Kong for four nights in October. In a rush of excitement I purchased two tickets before the crashing realisation that the one person I desperately wanted to take is now permanently unavailable. I asked Benjamin if he wanted to join me and Wednesday evening we made our way to Mong Kok where I was surprised to find we had second row seats. Close enough that Trevor Noah didn't just see us, but interacted with us. I never get starstruck (professional hazard of having a dad who worked in the film industry from my childhood until he retired) but I'm not going to lie, when he walked out on stage, I turned bright red and lost my breath. Trevor Noah was RIGHT THERE... and somehow, terribly, Michael was not.

It was an amazing evening. Both Ben and I laughed so hard. And we were joyfully surprised by how much Trevor Noah got right about Hong Kong. There's been a vast number of musical and performing artists who come here and go on and on about how much they love China, that Beijing is their favourite city and Shanghai is so electric and they love to shout xie-xie and ni hao (thank you and hello in Mandarin) without ever acknowledging that Hong Kong is its own unique place with plenty to offer and be excited about, not to mention most people here speak Cantonese not Mandarin. Even Trevor Noah's opening act kept talking about how Beijing is the greatest city and dropped all the Mandarin vocab he knew, and then when the response was lacklustre, he asked if we were awake. But not Trevor Noah, who immediately asked someone next to us if they spoke Cantonese and then shared about all the places he visited this week and his observations on the local culture and diverse range of nationalities that make up this remarkable city. I was a fan of Trevor Noah before Wednesday, but after that night I became a FAN. And no, I didn't take a photo. And yes, I missed Michael so much. He would have loved it.

So what did I learn this week with these two tricks and a treat?

Terrible, awful, hard things will continue to happen to me. Wonderfully delightful things will also come along. Michael will not be here to hold my hand or accompany me to any of it, and the pain of that is as sharp today as it was nearly eleven months ago, and the surprise of that remains as fresh as ever. But I also realised I'm far stronger than I give myself credit for, my children are gracious, lovely humans with hearts so much like their father, and that it is a pleasant thing to have sore cheeks from smiling.

More soon.