I had a dental appointment yesterday to get a filling. When I entered the examination room, the dentist asked me if I needed to be numbed.
I replied, ‘I don’t know. You tell me… ’ How the hell was I supposed to know whether what she was about to do was going to be painful?
So, she gave me an injection and said, ‘Let me know if you feel any sensitivity.’
‘Okay,’ I replied, ‘I’ll raise my hand.’
Without allowing any time for the injection to kick in, she started cleaning my teeth, a process she called ‘de-scaling’. Then she set about doing something to the tooth that needed to be filled. I have no clue what, but it felt like she jammed a pickaxe into the nerve. So, I raised my hand, arched my back reflexively, and twisted my face into a grimace.
‘Is that sensitive?’ she asked calmly.
She still had her fingers in my mouth, so I gurgled, ‘Ugh ugh.’
She gave me another injection. It took a while before I relaxed enough for my back to make contact with the chair. As she continued faffing with my mouth, I pretended to be fascinated by the light fixture. It just feels awkward to make sustained eye contact with somebody who is shoving metal objects into one of your face holes.
At one point, she had her finger hooked in the corner of my mouth and was pulling, turning my head in the process. She said, ‘Turn your head.’
So, I instinctively turned in the direction she was pulling.
‘The other way,’ she sighed impatiently.
So, I spent the rest of the appointment in an oral tug of war whilst trying to stay focused on my favourite light fixture.
By the end of the appointment, my mouth was completely numb on one side. I went to swill with the weird pink drink they have, and it squirted out the side of my mouth like a garden sprinkler. Slightly embarrassed, I joked in a slurred voice, ‘I guess I’m going to leave it a while before I have coffee.’
She tutted and said, ‘I only gave you quarter of a syringe.’
By the time I got home, my mouth was numb three-quarters of the way across. I went to have a cold drink, and it instantly leaked out the corner of my mouth straight down my shirt. I had to change my clothes. Needless to say, I’m glad I didn’t try to drink coffee.
