Michael A. Nettleton
“So, how was your trip to New Orleans?”
“Fgmbgnbrt!” (Hot and humid. Could we maybe stick
with yes-no questions?)
“And the food? I love creole food?” Dr. R. waggled
the soon-to-be ex-resident of my mouth back and forth.
“Itmgth waghth exquifgtr!” The etouffee was exquisite.
I was strangely proud of getting most of the word exquisite out around the
cotton wads, dentist fingers and ominous tooth-pulling vise grips in my Novocain
saturated mouth.
Dr. R. levered the wisdom tooth back and forth. “Good
job, good job,” she smiled behind her mask. “We’re almost there.”
I wondered if it was part of the psychological unit
at dental school. Make the patient feel like he or she is part of a team. All
working toward the same goal.
“Good job, good job,” she burbled.
Luckily, my role in the team was sitting in a chair,
stoned out of my gourd on nitrous oxide, mouth gaping and drooling prodigiously
from gums I could no longer reliably testify were living tissue. If Dr. R was
the power forward, I was the team’s water-boy for sure.
After more wrenching, waggling and walloping, the tooth
came away. I have a nitrous-triggered vision of Dr. R and two of her assistants
bent over backwards with their feet braced against the wall, six hands gripping
the forceps, fulfilling their part in the team extraction.
“Good job, good job,” All three of them cheered the
effort. I almost expected them to exchange high 5s and fist bumps. I would have
joined them; except I was busy spitting blood.
“Mefdgtr Jgrbgl” Good job, good job. I
contributed. “Hbvget uh rnfgse?” How about a rinse?
Since my mouth was already pried open with an entire
Alabama cotton field of little tubelets, Dr. R. opted to make my day complete
by taking care of a little cavity in another part of my mouth. Compared to the
extraction, it was a walk in the park. Until . . . until . . . the low-speed
drill came out.
“We just use this for a second to grind down a
stubborn place,” She said. “It’s kind of a throwback to the old days.” Kachunk,
kachunk, vreep kachunk, went the drill. “Good job, good job,” she trilled. “Almost
done.” I wondered how much it would add to my bill to have the nitrous turned
up to the wildly-hallucinating setting.
I closed my eyes and listened to the drill sound
that could have been lifted directly from the soundtrack of The Marathon
Man. Dr. R. looked nothing like Laurence Olivier’s sadistic Nazi torturer,
but still. I closed my eyes and was suddenly transported back to 1957.
An eight-year-old me sat on a stack of pillows in
the chair of our small town dentist whose name I disremember. We’ll just call
him Dr. Painmonger. Dr. P, who thought Novocain was a fad that would never
catch on, was drilling at an offending bicuspid in my tiny mouth. He used
several fingers to pry open my lips to make room for the implement of torture. “Vreep
vreep, kachunk, kachunk,” it went. I whimpered. Dr. Painmonger gave me a thump
on the shoulder. “Don’t be a crybaby,” he said. “Vreep kachunk. Vreep, vreep,”
Tears ran down my cheeks as he drilled. He pulled the device out, still running.
“Vreep,”
“No more,” I whined. “It hurts. Bad.”
He slapped me. Hard. “There. Now you’ve got something
to cry about.”
When I told my mother what had happened, she tskk
tskked me. “Michael Alan, I’m sure kindly old Dr. Painmonger would have have
hit you.”
“But he did. He slapped the shit out of me.”
She made her disappointed mother face at me. “I
would hate to have in my hand, what you just had in your mouth.”
“But he did.” I insisted. “I won’t go back to him. I’ll
let all my teeth rot out before I’ll go back.”
“Don’t be silly,” Mom smiled and patted me on the
head. “You’ll forget all about it. Dr. Painmonger is your friend.”
I sniffled. “If you
make me go back to him, I’ll . . .
I’ll . . .” I couldn’t think of any kind of a threat
that could help me avoid that drill. “I’ll join the Navy.”
After a drive to Coos Bay, my mother and I had a
very nice conversation with the Navy recruiter. He told her to bring me back in
ten years. But I never returned to be treated by Dr. Painmonger. In fact I
avoided dentistry altogether for twenty-something years. Until a dental
emergency sent me to a trippy tooth yanker in Albuquerque, New Mexico and I
discovered laughing gas and Novocain would distract me enough to get the necessary
work done. In fact, they could have pulled my kidneys out through my throat and
I wouldn’t have noticed. My reverie ended as the nurse pulled the nose hood off
and the effects of the gas wore off.
I soon found myself standing out front at the
receptionist and book keeper’s area of Dr. R’s practice.
“That’ll be 148. 75 for today’s visit,” Nancy said,
pushing the credit card device toward me.
I pulled out my Visa and paid the bill. On my way
out the door, I could swear I heard Nancy and the receptionist Gayle chant. “Good
job, good job.”
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