Newsmessenger - Traumatic Dentistry

Note - I've had a few people ask me if I was still writing for the paper. Writing, yes! Posting the articles to my blog, no! I'm going to do a little catching up over the next few days.

There I was, white knuckling the dentist chair. I couldn’t have been more than 14. Dr. Christensen’s size 10 right loafer firmly planted on my left cheek, left foot on the armrest of the dental chair. His two hands, which oddly always smelled, or worse yet tasted, of pepper, gripping the handle of a cartoonishly large pair of construction-grade needle nose pliers pulling desperately at my lower-right wisdom tooth.

“I’ll get you out of this mouth if it’s the last thing I do!” he said maniacally.

To this day, I wonder why he didn’t take all four at once. My guess was that he only had a couple of payments left on a boat and my bottom teeth would cover that amount quite nicely. Better to wait for his daughter’s wedding before extracting the top two.

I showed him, though. Some 20 years later and a thousand miles removed from that dental chair, I waited until one of those top two wisdom teeth abscessed, helping my then-dentist Dr. Tuttle re-roof his house or take the family to Disneyland with those extracted chunks of enamel.

At least he had numbed me. I was to the point that I looked forward to the shot and its accompanying round of the sweats, which always caused me to soak through my shirt.

Dr. Christensen had a bad habit of uttering a line that to this day sends a shudder up my spine — “I think we can fill this one without numbing you.”

It never worked. Eventually, I always needed the numbing. I’ve often wondered if a heart surgeon could get away with that line?

“The valve is quite close to the surface of the chest. I think if you bite down on this rolled up Highlights magazine, we should be able to fix it without bothering the anesthesiologist.”

And now back to my exaggerated memory. I felt a bead of sweat drop from Dr. Christensen’s uni-brow and land smack-dab on the portion of my tongue that housed the taste buds for sweetness, and suddenly I felt a gagging sensation. Well, that’s not exactly what happened. Funny how things that seemed so dramatic, so intense as a kid were, well, quite a bit less dramatic once you put them into context as an adult.

Dr. Christensen did remove my two lower wisdom teeth somewhere around the time when the A-Team was battling it out with Magnum P.I. in the ratings. A time when the phrase “the plane” made you think of a fantasy about to be realized and not removing your shoes and wondering if anybody will notice that your toothpaste tube is .6 ounces too big for your carry-on.

When I was a kid, a trip to the dentist meant filling cavities. Preparation for the dentist was much like cramming for a test. The night, or sometimes morning, before, I would dig through the cupboard and find that old dusty container of floss. I would then proceed to turn that white floss string red from the bloody gums that accompanied my semi-annual flossing. I would be very certain to brush daily, sometimes even twice a day for at least three days leading up to the visit. The goal was to knock down the layer of what I liked to think of as “fur” off my teeth before sitting in the chair.

As an adult and father, it’s humorous to see the dentist through a much different lens. I now floss daily. It’s not because I’m passionate about flossing, it’s because if I don’t I know I’ll get a cavity, and I have crummy (translation, little to no) dental insurance. That means I’m out a couple of hundred bucks for a filling, heaven forbid we’re talking crown or root canal.

I’m also hyper-vigilant about my kids brushing and flossing habits. Four kids plus two adults, divided by terrible to no insurance, times a bad genetic hand (I’ve often said my wife’s teeth are made of candy corn) equals an awful lot of money when we let the oral hygiene slip. I’m now convinced that my parents looked the other way with my youthful dental practices, thanks to what was probably pretty darned good dental insurance. But lucky for my family, the first thing I noticed was that our dentist has tiny feet. Perhaps their childhood memories won’t be as traumatic as my visits to Dr. Christensen.