When I was very much younger I had to suffer braces on my teeth for a few years. The experience was uncomfortable and unpleasant but, every Friday, I would bravely face the dentist and allow him to inflict upon me the most unspeakable acts of torture. He was a kind man, and the experience somehow never registered in my memory as being extraordinarily bad.
Between puberty and adulthood, however, I developed a morbid fear of dentistry in general, and dentists in particular. Aside from the very occasional emergency work, I have studiously avoided them* and evaded having a proper dental checkup for something like a decade.
Very recently I succumbed to an unpleasant toothache, at which point the dentistry profession commenced the extraction of something like back-pay for all those years of neglecting my teeth. In the last month, I have suffered through three fillings and a most uncomfortable clean, which was performed with an instrument that I feel sure must have been invented by Dr Joseph Mengele himself.
That said, my dentist herself is a very kind and competent person who has done her utmost, without success, to put me at my ease. I noticed on my first visit that she was wearing fishnets under her slacks. With the promise of extreme pain and the loud grinding noises, my dentistry differs from fetish night at Gandalf’s only in the absence of flashing lights. You would think that I would be comfortable, but I am not.
Today I returned to Dr Dominatrix unexpectedly. The last tooth that she filled had become increasingly sensitive, and then painful, to such an extent that I have spent most of the last week off my face on over-the-counter pain killers. It took her several seconds to decide that I needed that most dreaded of dental procedures, a root canal. Being aware of my phobia of dentistry, she primed the syringes and waited until the last moment before announcing what she was about to do, which was a good thing because only the fact that she was already poking 2″ needles into my gums prevented me from bolting. As a result, I am now one third of the way through the process.
The good news is that, contrary to public opinion, root canals are no more painful than a regular filling. The bad news is that there is a point during the procedure when they jab a needle-like springy file into the channels of your teeth, and keep on jabbing until you feel it poking into the meat that is inside your head, beyond your gums. Sweet Jesus! Thinking about it brings a tremor to my hand.
Truly, I have come closer to freaking out completely today than I have been for years. Tomorrow afternoon I get to go back for more. My advice is to brush and floss.
*: Not so studiously, during my time in medical school.
