Between the ages of 5 and 6, my little brother had a recurring dream. It was quite weird and off putting, almost like a nightmare. He told us about it many times, but we didn’t really believe him since there was no reason to think it was anything more than a dream.
The dream always went like this. He would play in the nearest park to where we lived, the Buttes Chaumont. At first, there were always people around him, and we weren’t far away, so there was no reason for him to worry. He would often get absorbed in his game, unaware of what was going on around him. After a few minutes he looked up and realized that he was alone - the park was now empty. He got up, worried, looking everywhere for us, and ended up getting lost. He would then sit down by a fence that, from the description he gave me, looked like the fence of the petite ceinture, the abandoned train line that runs around Paris.
As he sobbed and called out to us, some kind of creature approached him. He described her as a small, wiry woman with big black eyes and long black hair. The strangest thing was her skin, if you could really call it that. It was bone-white, cracked in places, but the most terrifying thing was the area around her mouth, full of holes, most of them filled with teeth. Each time, she offered him a deal. A tooth for the chance to see his family again. Of course, my brother accepted. Sometimes he had the impression that it was real, and in that case, a tooth wasn’t much to get back home. And when he was aware that he was dreaming, he didn’t think he committing to anything. In any case, the creature he was making a deal with wasn’t real, so it didn’t really matter. He had the dream about twenty times, every few weeks. Then, shortly after his sixth birthday, the creature stopped visiting him.
As I said, none of this would have been particularly odd if there had been no strange occurence in my little brother’s life.
Around the age of 8, we noticed that none of his milk teeth were falling out. At first, we didn’t think much of it, even though it seemed to worry him to see all his friends losing their teeth while his didn’t even move. After a year, just before her ninth birthday, we ended up seeing an orthodontist, as my parents found it a little worrying. Quite surprised, she prescribed x-rays, hoping to understand what was wrong.
When we came back, the diagnosis was clear. He was suffering from dental agenesis, or more specifically, oligodontia. For those of you who have never heard the word, and we hadn’t until the orthodontist told us, dental agenesis is the absence of teeth. It is often linked to a developmental defect.
It can affect both baby teeth and permanent teeth. It is not so rare; the most common is agenesis of the wisdom teeth. There’s also agenesis of the canines - yes, I assure you, you’ve probably already met someone without canines. But most people with this condition miss one or two teeth at most… Oligodontia is fairly extreme and rare, and involves missing more than 6 teeth. In my little brother’s case, there were no permanent teeth at all.
I can tell you we were all surprised! The orthodontist added that she’d never seen anything like it in her 20-year career. In general, missing teeth like this are a symptom of a more serious developmental disorder, and other organs are affected. But my little brother was perfectly healthy, with no particular problems with his physical or mental development. He was a perfectly ordinary child. But what was even more astonishing was that… how can I explain this to you… dental agenesis is the absence of tooth development. Normally, there is no trace of a tooth, because it has never begun to form.
In his case, the teeth had been present. On the X-ray of his jaw, you could see some hollow spaces, places where the jaw was a bit different. The orthodontist was very uncomfortable. She mumbled something about a possible malfunction of the odontoclasts. I later found out that odontoclasts are the cells that destroy the roots of baby teeth when the permanent teeth come in. But they weren’t supposed to attack adult teeth, and my little brother’s baby teeth seemed completely intact, so it didn’t make any sense.
We’ve never really had any concrete answers to this problem, but he’s had various treatments to keep his milk teeth as long as possible and at almost 30, they’re still in good condition. It must be a bit disturbing for people who meet him for the first time, a rather tall adult man with tiny teeth, that’s an unusual sight. But it doesn’t have a negative impact on his daily life, so he grew to accept it.
Sometimes, I just wonder what would have happened if we’d taken his nightmares a bit more seriously and had him see a doctor sooner.