My tooth hurt. A lot. That meant I would be going to what I feel is one level up from hell itself, and that’s the dentist. Since there were no available appointments in Carleton Place, I would have to go back to my dentist in Barrhaven. He is a gentle but slow dentist, but I don't mind him much, because my emphasis is on the word gentle.
I try to take care of my teeth so I DON’T have to go to the dentist. I believe that if my teeth aren’t broke, they don’t need fixing. It may not be the wisest course of action, but it's what I can handle.
I can tell you with great certainty that I am not alone, because let’s face it, sometimes dentists are scary.
Enter my dentist’s father, a super-happy dental guy who has been poking at teeth for probably half his life. I swear that after he x-rayed my sore tooth, there was a gleam in his eye as he said those two dreaded words to me. . . root canal.
Gulp.
After the lecture about if I had been getting regular check+ups he could’ve caught the cavity before it killed my tooth (blah blah blah), he told me to come back in a week and he would fix it.
I hate lectures. I travelled 1.5 hours round trip so I could be told to visit the dentist more and make another trip next week.
I should’ve known there would be a problem when I walked in, and Dr. Dentist hollered before I could sit down that I was one minute late and he had to get me in that chair and get me frozen.
I apologized for wasting his 60 seconds and popped my bum in that chair before another 5 seconds was missed. I gave the hygienist a look. She understood me immediately, but offered no peace.
Apparently I was in trouble.
I’d brought my MP3 player with me to listen to music while my mouth was torn asunder. I figured I’d be distracted and could turn up the volume when the drilling in my skull became too loud.
Dr. Dentist would have none of it until he had jabbed the needle into my gum line a few times. It was a better use of time. After all, we had 60 seconds to make up for.
Ever heard of a dental dam?. It’s a piece of balloon that they put around the tooth for a clean working environment. Dental dams are great, I guess, if you like choking on and tonguing latex.
The worst part is that I have a small mouth. Quit laughing, people. Figuratively, I have a huge mouth and I know it. Physically, not so much.
So when Dr. Dentist pulls my lips over my skull and staples them to the back of my neck so there will be no opportunity for my nasty saliva to infect his workspace, I felt my jaw click to the permanent-open status and wondered if I would ever be able to close my mouth again.
I feel like I'm getting an extreme makeover, and I'm gonna look like the Joker when I'm done, with my lips ripped wide open. God be praised for skin elasticity.
Dr. Dentist gives a John Madden play-by-play as he works on my tooth; what’s inside, how the roots grow and die.
The irony is I had my music, but he would talk louder than I could play it. He asked me if I wanted him to shut up about how easy it was to find my canals and isn 't it great that the pulp inside isn't diseased?
Lord, give me strength.
If I could talk, I would’ve told him that if I wanted to know my tooth that well, I’d go out and buy the biography.
Here’s the scary part. As he finished the job, the gleam in his eye returned. He said, as if in a bizarre Apocalypse Now scene that there’s nothing like the rush of a good root canal in the morning. He says he’ll never quit dentistry.
There were beads of sweat dangling from his chin the whole time, spilling onto his scrubs. Yikes, he was leaning over me! Can a human survive a latex-sweat-from-stranger-induced vomit session? Would I choke on my own sick?
Because the panic that set in watching that bead of sweat hanging from his chin almost sent me screaming from the chair.
No dentist should ever take that much joy in his work, in my pain. It’s just creepy.
