Or How I Learned What Burning Teeth Smelled Like.Today was that day I've long dreaded. The day I got cavities and had to have them drilled and filled. I fretted all last night and The Boy called me a wuss. Then he quickly ran away before the laser beams shooting from my eyes burned through his skull.While I sat in my reclining chair I wondered just what makes a
person want to become a dentist. It must take a special breed. (I know
I wouldn't want to spend my day with my hands in someone's mouth.) And
people tend to be unhappy about seeing you. And they lie to you about
flossing. (Just for the record, I don't lie. I know you know I don't
floss enough.)I would've asked my dentist about all of this, but
as soon as my reply to his "Hi! How are you today?" came out, I had
cotton swabs with numbing cream shoved between my lip and gums. To say
I felt silly would be an understatement. I had swabby tusks jutting out
of the lower part of my mouth. Then came the needle.Dentists are like all doctors. They lie...
So he asks "Do you feel that? The slight pinching?" and I say
"Graargh!" which he understood to mean "Yes." but really meant "Dear
god, man! 'Slight pinching'?! Are you fucking kidding me? I'm waiting
for this needle to come out the other side of my head!" And when the
numbing started to kick in, it was a disquieting kind of numbing. Not
in a "I got shitfaced and no longer feel my face" way, but in a "My
face feels like a slab of meat from my lower lip down" way. This, of
course, meant that I had to keep poking at my chin and lip until the
dentist decided to shove about fifty pieces of cotton in my mouth and
have a conversation with me.I'll admit that I don't know how they understand a word coming out of our mouths. I couldn't even understand myself and I knew
what I was saying. But he figured it out somehow. Like he knew that
"Ga-gaaoow!" meant that my left side wasn't as numb as I'd have liked
and could feel him drilling. He called it "slight sensitivity". And he
also knew that "Aaiiit!" meant that I wanted a white filling and not
the usual metallic kind. Which is totally cool because you can hardly
see the stuff. All in all, it took only an hour to get rid of
both cavities. The real adventure happened at home when I tried to eat
lunch. The dentist warned me about that. Said that I might bite through
my lip if I weren't careful. I was careful, but I wasn't pretty to
watch. I had to hold my face to feel if any food was dribbling out of
my mouth and to keep track of where my lip was at all times. I got
through mealtime unharmed. I'm not so sure about the cat though. He sat and watched me eat. I'm not sure if he was too traumatized to move or more amused.
more...Autoresponder MarketingOriginally Posted on 10/3/2005 8:25:18 AMContent source: http://erratic_prophet.egoweblog.com/blog/strange_things167167167167/much_hate/2005/09/23/dentistschair