Triple the Fillings, Triple the Fun
Wednesday, November 02, 2005
I went to the dentist this year for the first time in like two years. Wayyy overdue. Had to get a filling the last time I went in (the first in my adult teeth). But I take care of my teeth pretty well, so I wasn’t too worried.
I get back to the chair and the dentist’s assistant, a little Mexican girl, starts laying the bed-side manner on pretty thick. Telling me I have nice teeth and asking if I wore braces when I was younger. It worked, too. Pretty soon I was telling her about my friends and my job and she was telling me about her cousin’s neighbor the drug addict. Best buds, we were.
Then she starts taking x-rays. At my old dentist they only took two x-rays: left side and right side. Done. This girl took like twelve x-rays! The best part was the heavy lead blanket she put over my chest and how she ran out into the hallway every time she took an x-ray. Are alarm bells ringing for anyone else? Should we really be shooting x-rays at point-blank range INTO MY MOUTH if an errant ray could harm someone in the hallway? Then she pulled out this cool camera wand and took pictures of the inside of my mouth. Turns out the back of my front teeth weren’t so clean (just stained a little). But the way they put the pictures up on a TV screen was like saying, “You thought you knew how to brush, didn’t you? DIDN’T YOU?!? You were wrong.”
The dentist comes in and promptly declares I have a cavity. Awesome. Figured I might. No bedside manner with this guy, he just gets in and starts drilling away. The worst part about the drilling is the smell of pulverized tooth. It gets in your nose and you can’t get rid of it. I can still smell it now. After he finishes drilling out half of one tooth, he says, “I think you might have a cavity in your wisdom tooth. I would like to check it out.” Translation: “I’m going to drill around some more to see if my hunch is correct.” Balls. More pulverized tooth smell. Sure enough, another cavity. Hey doc, while your at it let’s drill out the rest of my molars! It’ll be swell! No, I’m glad he found it when he did. A filling sounds less painful than a root canal. Yikes.
The best part (read: “worst part”) about get a filling is that half your face is numb for three hours after the surgery. Do you know how hard it is to spit when half your face is numb? Let’s just say I almost gave my shirt a nice saliva stain upon leaving the dentist. Did you like that visual? I thought you would. Here’s a list of other things that are new impossible to do with half your face numb:
- Whistle
- Notice you’ve bitten your lip.... multiple times
- Play a brass instrument
- Taste food
- Sing opera
- Drink water without it spilling out the side of your mouth (a la Kramer)
- Orate a filibuster
Keep these in mind the next time you go to the dentist.
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