My Dentist is Out to Get Me

I don’t know why I keep going back to the dentist. Every time I do, they not only tell me I have millions of cavities (okay, maybe it was just three…), but then they try and murder me.

Two weeks ago I went to the dentist. A new one, because the last one told me I had holes in my teeth that didn’t belong and they needed to be filled. Fine. Fill them, but I’m never coming back. So this new dentist decided to appraise me for three cavities, which is the reason I returned to that bright-lit torture chamber of his.

I sat down in that super long, awkwardly skinny chair they always have. The assistant leaned the chair back, positioned a light in front of my face, and proceeded to blind me with it. Fortunately, he noticed the smoke billowing up from my eyes due to the brightness of the light directly overhead, so he offered me some hip sunglasses. I took them, put them on, and instantly felt like the coolest dude in the room.

That was until the assistant proceeded to try and humiliate my by painting my gums with some sort of numbing goo with some sort of stick. He told me to bite on the stick part until the dentist came.

Well, I bit down on the sticky part of the goo-brush, and as I lay there, I felt the goop begin running down my throat. This essentially turned off my swallower, and life as I knew it became much more uncomfortable. But I was OK. I’ve had worse things happen to me.

Then the assistant started talking to me.

“So, where are you from?” he asked.

“Cddfhfsgjsk,” I responded as eloquently as one can with numbing goo running down his throat while at the same time chomping down on some sort of stick-thing.

Dentists and their assistants must be fluent in garbled gibberish, because he asked me about Cddfhfsgjsk, what the weather was like there…you know, normal human being type stuff. I nodded and grunted as much as possible, but he must have found amusement in my inability to speak, because he kept asking questions that I obviously couldn’t answer.

So there I lay, throat all but closed, mouth getting numb, and drool leaking out of my mouth, trying to answer is questions. After all us Cddfhfsgjskians are too polite to just not respond when spoken to.

Finally the dentist himself showed up, reclined my chair even more so that all the blood could rush to my head, and then he finally took the goo-sticks out of my mouth. By that time the damage was done, however. But I guess that was just what the doctor ordered (so to speak), because he took advantage of my numbed-up mouth to inject yet another numbing agent into my system, this time into my gums, rather than just painted on the surface.

I had thought my gums to be past feeling while trying to talk with the dentist’s assistant, but as soon as the dentist stuck my gums with that blasted needle, I realized they weren’t numb enough. He injected who-knows-what into my upper gums, and then did the same thing into my lower gums. Within a minute, I was completely past feeling.

That’s when he started drilling.

I’m not sure which is worse, getting stabbed voluntarily in my tender gums, or laying there while I feel the jolts and vibrations of his drill, listening to my teeth get excavated. I knew that just one false move on either of our parts would be the end of me.

So I lay there, hands clasped tightly, praying he wouldn’t sneeze.

After he finished the two top teeth and ventured down to my bottom tooth with a hole, I realized I should have prayed for something else. He started drilling into my poor little tooth and, unlike the top teeth, this one hurt.

Unfortunately, I’m far too much of a tough guy to scream and yell and make a scene, but I did grimace as he bored into my tooth’s soul. After a few winces, he asked if it hurt.

“Uh huh,” I grunted.

He stopped excavating and re-stuck me in the gum with his numbing needle. While that anesthetic took, he filled in my top teeth. That was relatively painless. That is, until the dentist started muttering to himself, saying how he’s going to have to readjust it and “I’ve never liked this system, anyway.”

Uh, what?

Now, I’m no doctor, but it would seem to me that if there’s a problem, you probably shouldn’t mutter angrily about it while holding a drill in front of your patient. That’s just bad manners, not to mention it scares the willies out of the poor bloke on the chair.

So, he tugged and pulled and tugged some more, until another assistant came into our torture chamber and he and the dentist exchanged words. After another minute, my dentist told his assistant that he was going to go finish a check up on someone else and that he would be back.

Great.

So there I was, gaping holes in my teeth, lying helplessly on my back, the blood still pooling up in my head.

The assistant remained in the room, and he took it upon himself to see that I was taken care of.

“Just relax for a moment,” he said.

Sure thing, boss. I’ll just relax, hanging like a bat while I wait for Mr. Dentist to come back and fill in the holes he just made in my mouth.

And of course, the assistant thought it was the perfect time for some leisurely banter. I once again grunted my answers. After ten minutes, my dentist sauntered back in, ready for round two.

He dug around in my mouth again, grumbling about his ineptness (that’s how I translated it, anyway). He finally fixed whatever problem he had created, poked my teeth  few more times for good measure, and then took out the sand blaster.

I thought the drill was scary, but with this new tool, I felt like I was a rough two-by-four being smoothed out for some kid’s pinewood derby car. As it turns out, he was just trying to level off the fillings so my mouth would close evenly.

He asked me to bite together, and then asked if everything felt normal.

Well, besides my face not working and me being unable to avoid chomping down on my now numb tongue, “normal” was something I was unable to identify. Still, the dentist took out his sander and once more went to town on my fillings.

He asked me to bite down again, asked me if everything was normal, I cried a little, and he went back to leveling off my teeth. This happened probably five or six times, and by the end, I could tell the dentist was getting a little antsy to be done. Little did he know that by asking me if everything felt normal in my bite, it was just taking him longer because everything was most certainly not normal.

Finally he finished, I tumbled out of the chair, and then they bled me some more at the front desk, this time from my wallet.

Fortunately, that was the last time I’m ever going to another dentist as long as I live. I don’t care how much they love getting paid to torture people. I will not support such monsters. But if I do end up going back, I’m going to come prepared. I’m going to have note cards with pre-written answers on them, so next time some wool headed dentist’s assistant asks me where I’m from, I can just hold up the card that says “Cddfhfsgjsk” instead of grunting it out like a feral buffalo.

 

Fun fact: It’s been three hours and I still can’t feel the bottom right side of my face.