As soon as I get in the chair she numbs me up. I had been dreading this all day because she seems to enjoy her job a little too much and one of the shots has to go directly in the roof of my mouth-which if you have never experienced such pain, just lay your hand down casually on the kitchen table and then take your handy dandy nail gun and drive a nail into each finger. That is about what it feels like. Nice.
My friend Lori asked me why I did not request to laughing gas. I had thought of this in the past. When I was a kid I used to get the laughing gas, but as an adult I was never offered such a tantalizing drug. Believe me, if it were offered I would be the first to jump on it, and the 20 minutes in la-la land would be like a vacation for me.
Anyway, I was left to sit in the office by myself until my mouth was good and numb. I only had a August, 1983 issue of National Geographic to keep me occupied. After about 20 minutes I started to wonder if she had forgotten me. My Endodontist is like a fart in the wind, she breezes in and out and spends most of her time in her back office-with the door closed.
As I sat there I started to imagine just what she was doing in that back office. I figured she was A) reading blogs on-line, B) knitting a tooth shaped pillow, or C) rubbing her little hands together and cackling with her sinister laughter as she waited just long enough for my Novocain to wear off so that I would feel every inch of pain that she was about to inflict upon me.
At one point her assistant came in and whispered to me "Are you still numb?" Now, this made my adrenaline shoot through the roof, which in turn freaked me out even more because I could not calm my heartbeat down and I knew the harder my heart was pumping the faster the blood was traveling through my body and distributing the Novocain to other parts of my body than to the tooth where it belonged. I was in a real-life horror flick! I was about to be Drew Barrymore in Scream and be the first to be killed in 5 minutes! Oh the HORROR!
To make matters worse, the woman in the torture chamber next to me was a talker. When my Endodonst finally emerged from her think tank, she went to the woman next to me and I sat and listed to her go from one subject to the next. I heard about her husband who had cancer, a blister on his right foot and a mysterious rash on his lower back. She then talked about her two dogs who are rescue dogs and she just spent $2500 on one of them to get a leg operation because it had a tumor on his little leg. Then she talked about her daughter who was going through a "nasty" divorce from a man who she is glad to be rid of because the dog with the tumor used to be theirs and he did not want to operate, he wanted to just put the poor thing to sleep for $150! Can you believe the cruelty? And then she talked about her neighbor who was going to be checking in on her husband while she was at the dentist and she just knew her neighbor would eat all of the coffee cake she left sitting on the table for her husband.
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
I don't have to tell you, but I was no longer numb.... or not as numb as I would have liked to have been. I prefer to not feel a drill going into my head at rapid speeds-that is just me though.
FINALLY it was my turn. I was reclined to look like a corpse in a coffin and she went to work. I felt pain-I felt a lot of pain! She explained to me that she could give me another shot to numb me, or I could bully my way through this house of blood and horror and get the heck out of there ASAP!
I chose door number 2 because I did not want to get another shot in the head and wait another 45 minutes for it to wear off so that my Endodontist could satisfy her Quentin Terintino rituals. I am no masochist!
Would it surprise you to know that my Endodontist's name is Bates... Norma Bates? Or maybe you would believe she is Orin Scrivello's daughter?
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