A Visit to the Dentist

Mediterranean breakfast: Bruschetta made with hummus, tomato, and basil, a side dish with olives and some orange juice. 

I had a tooth extracted yesterday, a molar that’s been broken for some time. It didn’t hurt or even bother me, which is why I waited so long with making an appointment. I’m scared of dentists, and ever since making the appointment a week or so ago, I’ve been watching myself for signs of fear or nerves in anticipation of this dental appointment. But it never happened. The day for the “surgery” approached, yet I was curiously calm and detached from the whole thing.

Since my regular dentist doesn’t do extractions, I’d been given a referral to another place. I got there way ahead of time. After filling out the prerequisite paperwork, I sat down in the waiting room. On the walls were framed posters featuring some quaint village in Italy or something, the room was a soft, light brown color. Shortly, a nurse called me. She cloaked me in that heavy vest, took a round of X-rays, and led me into the room where that low bed-like chair was waiting. But not even the look of the chair made me uneasy.

The dentist came. He was an older man with a kind face. I realized, again, how I like my doctors to be older men; it lulls me into a false sense of paternal security.

“How long will this take, approximately?” I asked, with my hands clasped over my stomach. The nurse pinned the drool bib around my neck.

“Well, my grandma always used to say ‘We know when we’re leaving, but we don’t know when we’ll get there’, and she was a fine, wise woman,” the dentist joked. “I think about 15 minutes, but don’t hold me to it, OK?”
Then he left. The nurse, whose name was Carla, asked if I wanted nitrous oxide or only local anesthesia. I said both, and so she put the rubber oval over my nose. It didn’t seem to take though, and I told her so.

“You aren’t breathing deeply enough,” she answered. She was very calm and kind. I pressed my lips together and took long, deep breaths through my nose. After about ten of them or so, I felt a pleasant tipsy feeling primarily in my hands. I heard Carla and another nurse chat in the background.

“Should I continue breathing?” I asked them stupidly.

“Yes, that would be a good idea,” said the other nurse, not Carla. “Sorry, a dental joke. Besides, we are much funnier when you breathe!”

Then I heard the doctor come back into the room. He sat down quite quickly, asking me to open wide. The sudden touch of the cold metal of the syringe made me jerk, a flash of silver shot through my mind, but he’d already jabbed me. One, two, three times. Maybe even more.

Then followed the peculiar wait for the anesthesia to take, when you just sort of sit there and hope the dentist won’t miss his or her window of opportunity. Usually I worry; what if it’s too soon, and the anesthesia hasn’t really taken hold? What if it’s too late? But this time I just sat there.

The dentist came back in.

“You will feel a pull and a push and you might hear a cracking sound,” he said as he took his seat next to me, where I lay supine, hands still clasped over my stomach.

“Uh-huh,” I said. I couldn’t say much more. By now, my mouth was propped open by some soft, plastic device and that gurgling vacuum-thing was hooked into the hollow of my cheek.

The dentist yanked a couple of times – with what I don’t know, because I was closing my eyes throughout the entire procedure  – and I had to fight to keep my head in place. But there was no pain.

“There,” he said after what seemed like less than a minute. “The tooth is all out.”

I gave him a thumbs up and he said good-bye and left. Carla put gauze where the tooth had been and gave me a prescription for codeine and more gauze, which she showed me how to fold. I decided to not take the train back home, but a cab instead. I called my husband, who was at home, to let him know I was done and all right.

At the pharmacy, located downstairs from our apartment, I had to wait for them to fill the prescription, and it unnerved me because I could feel the anesthesia abate in little waves. After I paid for the pills, I quickly ran upstairs. My husband was waiting for me.

“How do you feel?”

Before I even took off my coat, I swallowed a pill with some water.
“OK. I’m glad it’s over.”

We hugged. The sun shone through the halfway closed Venetian blinds, bathing the living room in light. I wasn’t allowed to eat for an hour, but my husband opened a miniature bottle of cheap wine and poured it into two small Irish coffee glasses.

“Cheers!” he said.

“Cheers!” said I, and we clinked.

It felt good to have it all behind.

Have a good weekend.