Dentist (A Trip to the)

I went to the dentist yesterday, never a pleasant thing to do, but I don't mind it as badly as some people do. Unfortunately I ended up being put through some fairly excruciating work without benefit of anesthetics. Things didn't get off to a good start when the new (to me) hygienist called me Brian. "Not even close," I said.

I probably should say that over the past two years I've had an inhuman amount of dental work for reasons I won't go into here. I've been drilled, prodded, poked, scraped, ground, grappled, x-rayed, and god only knows what else. After all of that I tend to get into a false sense of security that my teeth are finally, after so many miserable years, just fine. But the dentist can always find something wrong. A filling has a "leak". There's a shadow on an x-ray. The scraping thingy is hanging on something when it gets jammed into my gums.

Yesterday something showed up on the x-ray. At first the dentist thought it was a cavity between a crown and another tooth. Then the prodding began. The man scraped, poked, gouged, and pried at my skull while I got increasingly worried. Finally he announced that it wasn't a cavity. Yay, I thought, now he'll stop. Nope. What was in between my teeth was a glob of cement from my crown that was protruding into its neighbor. Precisely why this was suddenly an issue was never explained to me, but I never asked.

The dentist took this thing called, I think, a descaler, and began working it in between the two teeth. The descaler, or whatever the hell it's called, shoots a thin stream of water out at a high velocity. It's almost painful when being used in its normal manner, but when it's jammed in between two of your teeth repeatedly for a good fifteen minutes it can smart a little. He kept working at the glob of cement, all the while jamming the descaler into my gum. Oh, and I should probably mention that he also had one of those little mirrors wedged into my gums on the other side.

After the "procedure", I stood at the receptionist's desk to write my check; I could taste blood and was shaking slightly. I found it even more difficult than normal to form coherent sentences. While this was going on the next patient was standing at the window that looks into the receptionist's are from the waiting room. I didn't look directly at him, but I could tell he was watching me. When I left I imagined him saying to the receptionist, "Whatever you do, don't do to me what you did to that guy."