I am going to kill my dentist next Thursday

You might feel a series of slight pricks in your mouth.

So, do you do any fishing or anything (jingle jingle, clink clink).

And please resist the urge to swallow until I say its okay.

I think I have seen this movie at the video store when I got lost in the over-18-year-allowed-only pile-driving section of the gay videos. Its a little weird to experience in real life. It's sort of like the weirdest version of that Bill Cosby segment from Himself that I didn't actually think happened to actual people. Two things about Dentists though: 1) They don't care how big your mouth is or what deviant proclivities exist in your life, they are at least three fingers and a shiny object in the orifice in the bottom of your face. 2) Their idea of pain and my idea of pain are about as similar as the pink and the stink.

My new dentist, , seems like a very nice guy and seems to do a very good, albeit very painful, job of fixing my teeth up to my standards. Unlike a lot of people my age, I never wore braces or that weird sadomasichistic head gear that you now see in the fringe of extreme porn movies. But, the fact that when he asks me if I want local anesthesia before performing something called a pulpotomy made me slightly wary. I asked him what the pain would be like on a scale of 1-10, he cheerfully said everyone is different but it can't be more than a 3. I agreed to try it without the injections just to see if I could handle it. Thus it began.

He reaches in and stretches my mouth open just a tad bit too far and takes a pointy scrapy thing and digs into my tooth to remove something. (It was a little painful, but not too bad, equitable to a slight pinprick). He began to slow dig around in the tooth for something, gold I think, and struck a little bit of exposed nerve. I about punched this fucker in the face and horizontally jumped 8 inches out of the chair. My eyes were open so wide that he could see my optic nerve and the finger-muffled bellow sent squirrels hiding for about 4 square blocks. I would have told him anything he wanted to know and began to as long as he would promise to never do that again. It turns out that we had our scale backwards. He thought a 10 would be the weakest pain and 1 would be the worst. I corrected that immediately and, after apologizing for the horrible names I had just called his parents, daughters, sons and neighbors, asked for the injections. (I also asked for laughing gas, but that was more personal and not necessarily for any pain, just for fun). He did not have the gas but injected me fully with enough numby stuff to turn the left side of my mouth into a gibbering, drooling semblance of its former self.

Two hours, extreme jaw pain (see above paragraphs about mouth opening) and 3 x-rays later, I had no more tooth pain. I had actually forgotten what it was like to not have pain in the bottom of right mouth. Now, the procedure was quite gross and reminded me a great deal of that scene from Fight Club when Ed Norton says you can swallow a certain amount of blood before you get sick. I don't remember how much he said it was but I know I swallowed a lot of blood. Apparently you bleed a lot in your gums and jaw when someone pokes it with a pointy knifey thing. Now, a pulpotomy is forcible removable of the nerves and undertissue of a tooth and tooth root with a series of small sharp files that they stick into the canals, twist and pull. The small filey thing comes up with a stringy gross bloody mess of nerves and tissue and reminds me sort of like the insides of a freshly gut fish. He did ask me to close my eyes because my blood pressure would go down if I quit watching the procedure. Apparently I am a bleeder.

I was in pain the whole time, although it was potentially psychosomatic, and I don't think I handle pain very well on any level. However, it seems that an electrode attached to my testicles would not be as painful as this would be if there were no injections. After all people actually ask their lovers to attach those and give them mild shocks in their testes for fun. I don't mean the "tell me who your leader is!!" kind of voltage, but the lighter, feels like an uncomfortable vibration on the skin....waitaminute, I don't know anything about those sick freaks. They are all going to hell! They are all heathen bastards who are going to burn in hell!!! Praise Jesus!!!

I have another dentist appointment next Thursday to address the rest of my issue with this tooth. By the way, did you know that Dental insurance isn't actually intended to pay for anything other than cleanings. Yeah, I just found that out, too.