My Trip to the Dentist, by Tom T

Fridays are half-days at O2 during the summer, everyone gets to split at 1 PM. The rest of the week, I roll in at noon - 2 hours after everyone else - and roll on out at six. Giving me a six-hour day was my boss's way of compensating me for the fact that I make less money than I should - and WAY less than I used to earn at the same company. Summer Fridays are different though. I can't really come in for an hour and expect people not to get more steamed than they already are at me for having abbreviated week. So I come in at ten. Not like there's anything really earth-shaking that happens at O2 on a Friday during the summer that I need to be there for: everyone's kinda just hanging out drinking coffee and talking, tying up loose ends, etc. It's a little like the last day of school, except it happens once a week. Today, I used my afternoon off productively and went to the dentist - for the first time in over four years.

I really should have gone long ago, even though I've had no job, insurance, or money since 2001. My whole mouth is a dental emergency. Over a year ago, my crown came out with a Jujubee on the #2 train at one in the AM and I had to carry the golden molar back home in the palm of my hand, a crater gaping in my jaw. I performed oral surgery on myself in the middle of that night, sterilizing everything with hydorgen peroxide which I fortunately had in stock on the bathroom shelf. The metal post that sticks down into the jawbone had come out with the crown, and although I squirm whenever I retell this tale, I calmly did what needed to be done at the time: found the hole in my bone with the end of the post, and repostioned everything back down into my head. I'm just glad I was fairly sober at the time, because what I saw in that crater under the crown was truly horrifying. It looked like a range of black mountains, or one of those scare-pictures of tooth decay they show you in grade school to get you to brush your teeth. So the first thing I did upon re-entering the world of medical & dental was make an appointment to get that fucker looked at. I was SURE that by now it would just be a sloppy soft decayed mess under there, and figured I probably would need a bridge or an implant.

My appointment was for 2 PM with (we'll call him) Dr. Smile. Dr. Smile came highly recommended by a couple of the tech guys at O2, his office is in the Clocktower Building by the Atlantic Avenue station in Downtown Brooklyn. I learned today that that entire building is filled with dentists. 30 floors of dentists, and Dr. Smile was on the 29th. Practically the penthouse. I got there at about 1:50, and found the office locked which was particularly annoying, as the door to the office is the door to the elevator. So I rode up to 29, the door opened, and I was confronted with a locked door upon which hung one of those blue and white "Be back at" signs with a 'clock' set to indicate 2 PM. I knocked on the door but noone answered, so I went back to the lobby and read my book for ten minutes.

I finally got in and met the doc, who seemed very nice. Mid 30's I'd guess, and mild-mannered in a way that I'd hate if i knew him socially, but I really like in a dentist. I like dentists. I've always thought of them as sort of the firemen of the medical profession - it's easy to hate cops and doctors but more difficult to hate firemen and dentists. As I sat and filled out my forms, I thought about a friend who recently told me that she doesn't go to doctors because of her mistrust of the medical profession, and I wondered if she went to the dentist. Dr. Smile ushered me into the exam room shortly after my paperwork was complete and made mild-mannered small-talk about my job as i situated myself in the leather dentists chair. It had a video screen attached to the arm of the interrogation-light so that nervous patients could watch DVDs while having their mouths excavated. He slipped on his rubber gloves, pryed the crown out of my mouth, and immediately started poking around the crater with that sharp pointy thing. "It doesn't look too bad" he said. "uunnnhhh" I said. "Oh I know it looks bad, but that's just discoloration. There's not much decay here at all. Let's take an x-ray". He called in a hygenist and instructed her to set up the xray machine for "1st molar, lower left". The young lady got everything set up nicely with the film in my mouth attached to some other arm which was attached with a cable to the doctor's laptop on the countertop behind me. Next came the lead apron to protect all the little future Tom Tenneys swimming happily in my nutsack. The hygenist circled back around me to snap the picture and just as she disappeared from my peripheral vision, I heard a loud crash, a scream, and the cable attached to the arm attached to the film inside my mouth snapped my head back against the headrest and stretched my mouth back and to the left - but didn't come out. I was snagged like a fish on a hook... and had no idea what had happened. The second of mayhem was followed by a dead silence which told me that Dr. Smile was still in the room and the hygenist was in big trouble. I craned my ridiculously fishhooked head back to see what happened. She'd tripped on the cable running between my mouth and the computer, causing the laptop to go crashing to the floor. Dr. Smile was just standing there, and he wasn't smiling. "This is bad" he said, impassively. I knew he wanted to rip the girl a new asshole, but couldn't in front of a patient. Suddenly, I felt horrible for the poor girl and wanted to get up and defend her, but figured I should probably sit tight. "I tripped", she said, looking at her shoes. The doc began trying to put his computer back together again, but it wouldn't reboot. The girl left the room and was immediately replaced by another hygenist (I guess they have closets full of them), a male this time. He told the new hygenist to prepare a certain kind of cement, and told me he was just going to recement the old crown back on.

"umm.. what about that x-ray?" I asked. I was already worried about being in his care while he was furious at his hygenist, and wanted to make sure he was still following the game plan.

"Oh, we'll take that next time", he said. "I really just wanted to do that to dispel my own paranoia that there might be some infection lurking under there."

Great. Now I have paranoia. I, too, want to know if there is infection lurking, I thought to myself. But you always have those other voices... the ones that say "he's a trained dentist. he knows all about this shit. It'll be fine."

The recementing went off without a hitch. He told me he was using an extra-strong cement so I shouldn't have too much trouble with the tooth going forward. Smile left the office while the cement was drying, and when he came back in about ten minutes later he looked at the tooth and a troubled look crossed his face. "hmm.." he said and started his poking-poking-with-the-sharp-thing back up again. "looks like some cement dripped down between your tooth and gum. I'll have to get that out" The poking immediately resumed full steam ahead and this time it hurt like a mofo. He was jabbing, scraping and stabbing with reckless abandon and panicked about my poor gums were getting the brunt of Smiley's anger towards his clumsy assistant. "uuunnnnhhhh!" I shouted as he stabbed me in a particularly sensitive spot. My hands were white-knuckle clenched on the arms of the chair, my toes curling inside my sneakers. "Sorry" he kept saying, "we have to get this out". The procedure seemed to last for hours. After my second "unhh hunnhh aahh unh" he asked if I wanted an anesthetic - just another excuse to stab me some more, but of course I nodded my assent. Three shots to the gums, you know the ones he'd just been torturing, the needle jabbing right into my open wounds. Smiley continued his stabbing and scraping right after the shots, not even giving the novacaine time to do its thing. I wasn't numb until I was back out on Flatbush.

But the cement came off. My mouth is sore, but my tooth is fixed and I can once again eat Jujubees on the subway at 1 AM.