So I got to the dentist's office up at the top of the hill on state street in plenty of time, about 10 minutes before my scheduled appointment, parked the car in what passed for a sliver of shade, and went on up.
They were closed. The lights were on inside, so I knocked on the locked door a few times, went back outside to kill time in case everyone was at lunch, went back and knocked again. Nothing.
Then I remembered that there had been talk of a move to new offices down by the river. The person who called with my appointment reminder on monday hadn't said anything about it, but that might just have been an oversight. So back into the car, down the hill on the other Hubbard St, right on Barre, left on Main just missing the utility truck in the middle of the road, left on Stonecutter's way, and damned if the still-under-construction new building didn't have a functioning first floor. "We're running a little behind", the receptionist said as she greeted me and pointed to some fancy new chairs.
A lot of this vist took me back to my childhood dental experiences, from the rattling buzz of the amalgam capsule to the exquisite (well, no, not really exquisite at all) pain of the novocaine needle piercing the back of my jaw. The numbing went from the tip of my left earlobe to the middle of my chin, along with half my tongue, and lasted the better part of five hours, but it wasn't nearly enough.
Of course, when the nice new dentist started talking about things like "if the front corner of your tooth comes flying off when I drill out the filling, don't be surprised" I should have known it was going to be one of those hours. Oh, and the headrest was adjusted funny, so that even breathing through my nose was kinda difficult as the drilling went on and on and on. Every couple of minutes, the dentist would stop, and her assistant (in between bouts of talking about the new apartment she'd just moved into, with at long last ceilings high enough for the posts of her four-poster bed) would suction the debris out of my mouth so I could take a few big gulping breaths.
Did I mention that the suction gizmo, along with the chair, the equipment caddy (which kept swinging off into the distance), the compressed air and wash water, and even the wall clocks were still undergoing shakedown on this, the first day of operation in the new offices? The new pump was apparently set somewhere between neutron star and black hole, so that you had to dial the suction down to avoid sucking lips, tongue and eyeglasses into the sump along with whatever you were trying to clean up. And the flatscreen monitors and keyboards everywhere came with software that dispalys the treatment plan for every tooth, but woe if a dentist changes her mind somewhere deep inside a patient's mouth...
When all was said and done I staggered over to the food co-op and bought a bunch of soft things to eat, then drove home and slept for about four hours. And just think: two whole months until I get to do it again!
Posted by wallich at June 5, 2003 12:24 AM