Some Days It Just Doesn't Pay to Get Out of Bed

I don't think anyone likes the dentist. Given the choice between routine dental work and a day basking on the beach or taking in a really good movie, there isn't a person alive who would pick the dentist. I'm sure there are people out there who don't mind going to the dentist, and would pick that over, say, having their nosehairs plucked out one at a time. I am not one of them. I genuinely hate having to go to the dentist, for several very good reasons. Most notably, the dentist who almost dislocated my jaw with a bite blocker, the one who replaced all of my silver fillings with the less durable white fillings without telling me, and the one who said I needed a root canal right before I moved and didn't have time to have it done. The need for a root canal suddenly evaporated when I changed dentists, and no one else has mentioned it in seven years since.

Then, of course, there was this morning. My most recent dentist found five cavities. Not the record, but close. No dentist has ever looked in my mouth without wanting to drill at least one tooth and undertake a major renovation. Best of all, these five cavities are arranged such that they can't all be filled at the same time, so today I was in for the first three. Things were going fine for the first fifteen minutes or so when they put the numbz-it on and gave one more plug for the renovation [I had a condition that caused severe pain and potentially could have rendered me unable to bear children that doctors weren't half as concerned about curing as dentists are about this one misaligned tooth]. Actually, things were going well for about the first hour and fifteen minutes. Then, the novocaine started to wear off about halfway through filling #2 of 3.

I would have mentioned this development to the people drilling my face, but they had fitted me with a combination spit sucker and bite blocker that limited any sort of vocalizations to grunts, and those are pretty hard to hear over the drill and spit sucker. They must have been, since no one noticed I was trying to get their attention to stop leaning on my face so that I was biting my own upper lip against my will. However, the lack of novocaine did allow me to notice that the aforementioned spitsucker had glommed firmly on to the inside of my cheek, presumably spending the last hour giving my mouth the king of all internal hickies. And the next hour, too, since the appliance restricted my tongue just enough to make it impossible to dislodge the chunk of flesh from the sucky tube. The swelling has gone down, but that spot still feels raw five hours later. I probably should have just grabbed their arms to draw their attention to my increasing lack of anesthesia, but at the time, that did not seem like a good choice for dealing with people with power tools and pointy metal things in my mouth. I'll have to come up with something before I go back in a couple weeks for the other two fillings.

For this, I got to pay them a hundred and fifteen bucks.