Free At Last!

I had a two hour dentist appointment scheduled for today to get my five cavities taken care of. I learned a lesson from my previous visit and requested nitrous oxide for the procedure. They obliged and provided me with that nose mask thingy (which barely fit my schnoz) and I greedily started inhaling. While the shots were no fun, the rest of it passed fairly quickly and painlessly while I was floating through the procedure. I'm not sure why they call it laughing gas, since I did not have the urge to laugh, even when Dr. B. shared a golfing joke (about a minister going to heaven with the punch line being something about Tee-time on Sunday). Maybe it was his deliverance - it's weird that all his jokes seem to take place in heaven.

Since the fillings went fairly quickly and David, the hygienist had an opening, I transferred into his room for the second half of my deep cleaning. "Deep Cleaning" sound fairly benign, but in dentist lingo it is called "Perio Scaling and Root Planing". "Root Planing" sounds plain evil and since my shots were wearing off by the time David got going and I was off the happy gas, it was not a pleasant experience. The weird thing is that David strongly reminds me of Colin Mochrie from Whose Line Is It Anyway?, however that doesn't make it any better. He's actually a nice guy, and always inquires about our wedding (Jennifer is scheduled for her cleaning next week). Since we had time - and apparently I had not yet suffered enough - he also offered to remove some stains on my teeth (to look my best in the pictures). This is done with a sand blaster like instrument that sprays baking soda at very high velocity. It's fine when it hits the teeth, but half the time it felt like my tongue and lips were being tattooed. I ended up with a mouth full of grit and chapped lips. When he said goodbye, he reminded me not to eat anything for a while because I might bite my "numb" lip. I was sorely tempted to ask what he meant by "numb", but didn't want to sound like a whiner.

So I was released from the torture almost four hours after the appointment started. I had made the mistake of drinking a 20 OZ drink right before going to the dentist so I spent the last hour focusing on bladder control. In retrospect, it was probably distracting me from the mayhem in my mouth, so it wasn't a bad thing after all.

As I was leaving the dentist's office, I sang out: Free at last, free at last, Hallelujah, I'm free at last! - until the next cleaning in three months, that is.