The dentist

Everyone has a story about the dentist.

Some are how things go great and they’ve never had a problem. For these people, look in their mouth. Their teeth are almost undoubtedly perfect.

Others have nothing but horror stories, hitting the nerve during work, painful injections, dentists who say they will stop as soon as it hurts, but never do… The themes are endless.

I have weak teeth. While I was blessed with straight ones, they develop holes faster than a dirt road in a rainforest.

I brush, I floss, perhaps not enough, but it seems endless.

I’m pretty sure it’s because I had poor direction as a child. My mother would try enforcing good oral hygiene, but would often sit on the couch as we “brushed our teeth”, and rarely checked to see how well we did. It doesn’t help that one of first pediatric dentists was indicted for poor business practice, giving fillings to kids who didn’t need it. He went to jail.

Most recently I had to have some work done and their first attempt to freeze the area resulted in freezing the entirety of the left side of my head. I couldn’t close my left eye, couldn’t feel my nose, cheek, ear, forehead. My tooth, however, I felt that just fine. Then I sense I had trouble swallowing and my anxiety hit the roof. I left without having any work done.

The next visit, the needle used for freezing puncured my maxofacial nerve and sent horrific electric-shock-like pain all across the left side of my face. The end result was that the filling was replace and everything was fine from a dental integrity point of view, but my mental health most certainly suffered.

Every day I leave, they tell me: “You have to floss better - it will help”. I guess I should listen one of these times.

}