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Vs. the Dentist
Feb. 28th, 2008 12:30 pmI'm honestly trying to think up something entertaining to say about Tuesday morning, but I'm not coming up with anything to make it sound less hideous than it really was. After ages of trying to forget about it, I had finally made an appointment at the dentist - the first time at an American dentist and my first visit to any dentist since Reading Week in my last year of university just over two years ago.
They're nice enough about it. I had heard great things about this dentist (some of them verging on disturbingly enthusiastic, actually) and it was a less frightening experience than the dentist I used to go to in Scotland, but after two years of being blissfully unaware of any problems I might be having, throwing the following at me came as a shock.
The first thing they discovered, to cut a long story short, is that my mouth is the wrong shape. After irradiating my entire head with the 180-degree X-ray scanner thing and taking a first look inside my mouth, the hygienist's first comment was that I have unusual extra bones in my mouth. My last dentist never mentioned anything like that, so maybe it's normal there and we really are a different species in Britain. She also described the usual buildup of nasty things I have around my gums, but said that most people clean them to a lower standard than they do in America - refraining just short (as I'd been afraid of when I arrived) of mentioning my vampiric British teeth and how they weren't anywhere near artificial-looking enough to be American. Instead, she said we would just have to be "very thorough", bringing over a tray of things that looked like miniature hacksaws.
I don't think you've experienced true psychological torture until you've had to lie still with sharp things poking around in your mouth while the entire discography of the Spice Girls plays in the background. I was stuck there for at least half an hour while she went over my mouth with instruments of varying size and hideousness, and eventually finished off by rubbing a bit of what looked and felt like cheese wire between them all. After that had finished, the dentist came through to have another look at my freakish mouth - he was bursting with enthusiasm and was telling me about the time when his uncle was involved in a car chase, but I've never been quite sure what to do when dentists talk to you while your mouth is clamped open and you're strapped to a chair, only able to make vague dribbly noises in response to anything that's said.
I'm now told that dentists in America say this all the time, but I was told that it would be 100% recommended to have my wisdom teeth extracted. Even though I'm not feeling any pain from them at all at the moment, the trouble with them lies in my wrong-shaped mouth and half of most of them are actually growing into my skull. As a result of that, a couple of other teeth around the wrongly-pointed ones might become infected, and they already have a few holes in them that I'm going to have to get fixed next fortnight. A week before that, I'm going to see an oral surgeon about my wayward wisdom teeth, and if he decides they need to come out, I will need to schedule an appointment for skull-cutting surgery followed by a few days of excruciating pain in my calendar.
Teeth are so badly designed.
They're nice enough about it. I had heard great things about this dentist (some of them verging on disturbingly enthusiastic, actually) and it was a less frightening experience than the dentist I used to go to in Scotland, but after two years of being blissfully unaware of any problems I might be having, throwing the following at me came as a shock.
The first thing they discovered, to cut a long story short, is that my mouth is the wrong shape. After irradiating my entire head with the 180-degree X-ray scanner thing and taking a first look inside my mouth, the hygienist's first comment was that I have unusual extra bones in my mouth. My last dentist never mentioned anything like that, so maybe it's normal there and we really are a different species in Britain. She also described the usual buildup of nasty things I have around my gums, but said that most people clean them to a lower standard than they do in America - refraining just short (as I'd been afraid of when I arrived) of mentioning my vampiric British teeth and how they weren't anywhere near artificial-looking enough to be American. Instead, she said we would just have to be "very thorough", bringing over a tray of things that looked like miniature hacksaws.
I don't think you've experienced true psychological torture until you've had to lie still with sharp things poking around in your mouth while the entire discography of the Spice Girls plays in the background. I was stuck there for at least half an hour while she went over my mouth with instruments of varying size and hideousness, and eventually finished off by rubbing a bit of what looked and felt like cheese wire between them all. After that had finished, the dentist came through to have another look at my freakish mouth - he was bursting with enthusiasm and was telling me about the time when his uncle was involved in a car chase, but I've never been quite sure what to do when dentists talk to you while your mouth is clamped open and you're strapped to a chair, only able to make vague dribbly noises in response to anything that's said.
I'm now told that dentists in America say this all the time, but I was told that it would be 100% recommended to have my wisdom teeth extracted. Even though I'm not feeling any pain from them at all at the moment, the trouble with them lies in my wrong-shaped mouth and half of most of them are actually growing into my skull. As a result of that, a couple of other teeth around the wrongly-pointed ones might become infected, and they already have a few holes in them that I'm going to have to get fixed next fortnight. A week before that, I'm going to see an oral surgeon about my wayward wisdom teeth, and if he decides they need to come out, I will need to schedule an appointment for skull-cutting surgery followed by a few days of excruciating pain in my calendar.
Teeth are so badly designed.
