Why do I feel as if I'm on an "Electric Chair"?

The wait outside was agony. Was that a scream I heard coming from the room? Or was it a fragment of my imagination? Too much movies, perhaps? But that was reel. And this is real.

Twenty minutes later, it was my turn. The door swung open, and I slowly approached the chair, with much dread and apprehension. I plonked myself on the chair and open my mouth.

There was no scream. But something else - a scalpel, was probing my mouth, gently and mostly on my teeth. The man in white standing behind me said, "Relax, and you don't have to open your mouth so widely."

I paid a visit to the dentist today, unbelievably my first since 1986 when I was in primary 6. Everyone knows a visit to the dentist is one of life's most unnerving experiences, maybe next to having an injection. Can't blame me for procrastinating.

Yes, I remember the much dreaded dental clinic in my primary school all right – the "medicinal" smell, the "clinking”sound of dental tools on the dentist's tray, the sound of drilling..... and the occasional groans of pain and scream! Aarrgghhh!

Back then, we kids call the dental room Torture Chamber no. 2, the first being the principal's office. Nothing scared us off our pants shorts/skirts more than the sight of a school kid came a-knocking at our classroom door with the much dreaded A-3 size yellow dental card. It did not help that sometimes the kid would appear with bloody looking bandage dangling in between the corner of his lips, no doubt suffered at the hands of the nasty nurses in the Torture Chamber prior to knocking at the door. We kids would wait and pray with bated breath, hoping that our name would not be called. None of us kids liked to visit the dental nurses.

There were two dental nurses in my school. I remember one of them, only because of a huge mole located somewhere near her mouth. We kids privately called her "The Mole". A woman of huge proportion, the Mole would often yell at us kids to "open your mouth wider!" or passed cruel remarks like “your mouth stinks! Don't you ever brush your teeth?” A classmate of mine whose hair was lice-infested got the worst treatment of all. She was always at the receiving end of The Mole's horrible torture, occasionally being slapped for not doing anything about her hair. No one likes to stand behind a ball of lice-infested hair, I'm sure. But getting physical was just being abusive. Those were the 70s and 80s when being slapped by teachers and principals was common practice. If the dental nurse were to pull this stunt today, heads would definitely roll and parents would write to the forum, no doubt. Have our kids become "over-protected"? That's another subject for another day.

Back to my dental appointment today. I had suffered a rather bad toothache two weeks ago and called the dental clinic to book an appointment, only to be told that the next available date would be two weeks later. This dentist came highly recommended by the Slim Lady so I chose to wait, while enduring the toothache with painkillers. When I finally saw the dentist today, my pain was all gone. I thought of giving the appointment a miss but decided to go through it since I've not had my teeth checked for decades.

Unfortunately, the doctor told me that both my wisdom teeth and the molar teeth next to them have shown sign of decay, and advised me to remove them all. To do so, it would cost me an arm and a leg at about $1000! It's not about the money, though. It's the pain I fear.

The doctor "promised" me that my pain will surely and DEFINITELY come back to haunt me. It's either now or later. But I like it that he was not pushy about it, unlike some doctors I heard.

I'm usually not a procrastinator. But when it comes to pain, it's a different story altogether. I must be wise beyond my years. How else do you explain the wisdom teeth? So "wisely", I'd wait....


Category: Musings