They don't call them mercury-amalgam fillings any more, I guess. But when my dentist had gotten through talking to me about a Hayley Mills movie in which the character she was thinking of was played by Wilfrid Hyde-White rather than the actor with whom I share a homonymic surname, and about the social problems faced by kids from the boonies going to high-powered colleges, she decided that the filling on the back of my left eyetooth should be metal rather than composite.
In countries where they use only composite fillings, she opined, they may not have as many crazy people, but dentists spend a lot more time replacing worn-out fillings. Then she dropped the little bit of dye paper that's used to swab out the drilled cavity and reveal the last traces of decay into the back of my throat.
"Oops," she said. So after the filling was finished I explained to her that my freshman-year roommate, who has long since become an anesthesiologist, told me during medical school that surgeons are trained to say, "There" whenever they make a mistake, so that "I have just transected the aorta and will now attempt to control the bleeding" sounds less liability-prone on the operative transcript.
I guess that's not something dentists have to worry quite so much about.
Posted by wallich at March 31, 2005 11:38 PM