2004-01-27

Oh, how I long to feel my face!

I just got back from the dentist’s office, whereat I learned a valuable lesson; namely, that the elapsed time between dentist appointments is proportionately related to the misery experienced during each subsequent appointment. And I’d been putting this one off for a long old time. Like, the last time I went to the dentist, I got to pick what flavour tooth polish I wanted, and I got a prize at the end of my visit. This time: no watermelon toothpaste! No toothbrush-shaped pencil eraser! And what do I get instead? A cavity, that’s what. Fie!

The visit didn’t start off encouragingly: the first-time patient questionnaire posed the disconcerting question, “Do you become nervous during dental appointments?” “Should I?” I almost wrote, before remembering the time-honoured adage, “Never taunt the guy who is about to have your face in a vice grip.”

The cleaning went smoothly enough, though it did reinforce my irrational dislike of having pointy metal implements inserted in my mouth when they do not have pie attached to them. I passed the time contemplating a drawing pinned to the wall, presumably executed by one of the dentist’s offspring: it featured an outspread hand with two black fingers and a black circle in the middle of the palm, beneath a gold crown and something that looked like a pyramid. I hope my dentist knows that his sweet little Lisa is a Freemason. Weird.

Anyway, the painstaking archeological scraping of ten years’ worth of gunge off my teeth revealed a cavity; so I got to go through the unexpected fun of having anesthetic stabbed into my face, my mouth cranked open with a car jack, and holes bored into my jaw with an electric drill. And since then, of course, I haven’t been able to feel the left side of my face. Although it’s empirically interesting to experience a total sensate disconnect from my own lips, the novelty is wearing off a lot more quickly than the Novocain.