Dentists and Other Strangers

How did I get this life? Could I have another one please? One where I am thinner, prettier and have better teeth?

With two weeks to go before my surgery, even though I've had months, my phobic self finally called the dentist to look at my broken tooth.

It was not pretty.

We’ll call him Dr. Alarm. For starters, I think he hated me. When he asked me when I broke the tooth, I lied and said a month ago because I was so mortified. He was concerned about my health history to an embarrassing extent. I felt as though I had one foot in the grave. I had suspected I had an infection, which he confirmed like this: "For someone like you, who is immunocompromised, walking around with an infection like that is the equivalent to holding a gun to your head." He was almost hysterical and said it was the utmost emergency and danger.

Don't you hate it when people mince words?

He also confirmed something else I suspected: the tooth could not be salvaged. He said it was such an emergency that he called an oral surgeon to see if they could get me in immediately. They could.

The oral surgeon, we’ll call him Dr. Trepidation, was very nice. But he was pretty grim too. Danger, death, danger, septicemia, danger, death, death, death. And some more death. With extra death on top.

Dr. T. offered to pull it right then and there. But I want to be O-U-T and there was no one to drive me home, so I rescheduled for the next day when Death and my daughter could come with me.

I was not looking forward to this experience but was being as stoic as possible, reminding myself it would be over soon and then I would have nothing to deal with except blood, swelling, severe pain and a missing tooth. You know, nothing too terrible.

And I was right. It was not as bad as I expected.

It was a thousand times worse.

I've been to oral surgeons before to have extractions and they have always worked out ok. I have gone to sleep and woken up when it was over.

But I started to feel misgivings when Dr. Trepidation stood on my right side and leaned over me at an angle to put the IV in my left arm. He gave a push of something and, clunk, out I went. AND WOKE UP TO HIM PULLING MY TOOTH OUT!! I was competely befuddled, so I was horrified to hear myself moan VERY loudly. Even being numb, it really, really hurt.

I didn't say anything before I left, mostly because my mouth was stuffed with gauze. But now (because I am a mental case), it just keeps running through my mind. The ferocious yank, my not unreasonable reaction, then oblivion again. When the damage had already been done, when I had experienced the very thing I had not wanted to.

Sigh.




At any rate it is over now and I had even more fun coming up that night.

In the middle of the night, Mary Kate came downstairs to say she had heard someone walking in the alley between my house and my neighbor’s. The path is made of stones and she could hear footsteps crunching in the rocks. We both listened for about ten minutes and, hearing nothing, went back to bed. Just as I was about to drift off, I heard the stones crunching and then my garden gate, which squeaks, was opened.

When I heard steps on the patio, I called the police. The dispatcher asked me if I wanted to speak to the officers when they came. I looked down at my pajamas and could feel my hair going in 6,000 directions and said "Oh, no that's ok." Five minutes later, the policeman is knocking at my door. Jesus, didn't he get the 'don't talk to' message?!?! I couldn't find my glasses, which meant I couldn't find my robe which meant I had to put a coat on to answer the door. Try to look nonchalant and credible when you are standing in your living room at 3 am in pajamas and a winter coat.

Is it my imagination or are cops just getting younger and cuter?!? Or am I simply a dirty old lady?

They never did find anyone, but they were very thorough. And I never did go back to sleep. I was the only one among my colleagues who started working that day at 4 a.m.

It could happen:

____________________

Update: Great news. My friend Joe finally had his surgery and is doing well. Thank you all for your thoughts and prayers, but keep them coming if you can, he’s not completely out of the woods yet.

Check out his blog here.

This Bites

I have to say at the outset that I hate teeth.

I suppose I like the actual fact of having them. They do lend themselves to things like smiling without causing your companion to recoil in horror and the successful, comfortable consumption of food.

I just hate the fact that you can’t simply brush them several (in my case, several million) times a day and be done with it.

Oh no. Because teeth have an unfortunate habit of doing things such as BREAKING.

BOO HOO HOO HOO

I broke a tooth this morning. It is not really visible unless I open wide and show you, which is pretty unlikely. And it doesn’t hurt, thank goodness. Hmmmm, why did the thought ‘for now’ just pop into my head?

But it feels creepy and ragged and worst of all, now I have to go to the dentist. And I have a dental phobia.

I have nothing against dentists per se. I think a lot of them are really nice people. I am so sorry they have the highest suicide rate of any profession. It is just I cannot bear having a stranger stick his fingers in my mouth.

Heck, I don’t want people I DO know sticking their fingers in my mouth.

My most recent dentist, we’ll call her Dr. Mengele, was a horror. I guess not from a capability standpoint, as all the work she did on me still stands. Stands? Lies? I don’t know, none of her stuff has broken.

But she was so MEAN!!! The most distressing thing was that she initially seems really nice. She acts pleasant and tells you what she going to do and how she is going to take care of you. Then you discover…she is evil incarnate.

Once your ass gets slapped in that chair, you’re all hers. The first thing she does is recline the seat ALL THE WAY BACK, so you are practically standing on your head. I don’t know why, but this triggers a panic sensation in me. So I would start to hyperventilate (but NEVER complain!!! I was brought up to allow myself to be subjected to any kind of torment any authority figure is meting out) and I would meekly and pitifully ask if I could be sat up a little. And she would snap “No”.

So my panic would continue until I was half sitting up anyway, unable to breathe. It interrupted her and let me tell you she would get PISSED.

This happened every single visit.

Then, you know how dentists always tell you to put up your hand if they are hurting you? Well, if I put up my hand, she pushed it down and kept working!!

Finally I resorted to being sedated while she did her thing. This is one of her marketing points, that you can have all your work done at once, easy peasy, no pain, no unpleasantness, nothing to be afraid of. I took one pill before I left the house (driven by someone else naturally), and then another when I got there. Problem was, the sedation wasn’t taking. I was supposed to be out like a light but I was still aware of much of what was going on, including pain, and her being mean to me!! She would snap at me if my mouth wasn’t open enough or if I made a sound.

She told me ahead of time I wouldn’t remember anything. Wrong, Nazi girl.

She gave me an extra pill. Still not enough. Then another one. Still not enough. Finally I was begging for nitrous. She told me there would be an extra charge. I moaned I didn’t care. But she refused.

Can we all say ‘nightmare’.

Once the work I paid her for was done I never went back. Every time I sat in the waiting room, I had watched these happy, dazed people stumble out, thanking her profusely, clearly unaware of the torture they had just been subjected to. I wanted to be one of those favored ignoramuses. No such luck. I still have flashbacks.

Although I do have a nice smile.

So now I have to find a new dentist, which I have been putting off for years a while.

Did I say I hate teeth?