Torture

Dear Republican hard-liners: waterboarding is really unpopular. But I have an awesome idea. You can torture detainees even more, while fooling the Democrats into thinking that you’ve had a sudden change of heart.

Give free dental care to all detainees, paying special attention to fill cavities.

They used this huge needle to give me Novacaine. If I were giving an injection to a buffalo, I’d think the needle was unnecessarily large. Furthermore, they weren’t content with merely jabbing me with the needle. They stuck it way in, which was only mildly painful, until they must have jammed it into a vein or something, which caused excruciating pain. As I screamed in pain, the dentist apologized and shifted the needle ever so slightly.

They did one filling, and then the main dentist randomly left for about fifteen minutes. Meanwhile, her partner in crime was left to implement some extremely bizarre torture implement. All I saw was that a blue latex thing–a lot like a rubber glove, only a flat sheet of it, was fit over my mouth, covering it completely, while something sharp was jammed into my gums until I screamed out again in pain. “Oh, does that hurt?” She removed it, and I never saw it again, so I have absolutely no clue what that was all about.

Sick of seeing ridiculously scary weapons being brandished in my face, I kept my eyes closed most of the time. (Actually, it was more the cloud of tooth-dust rising out of my mouth, and a desire to keep it out of my eyes.) I eventually opened my eyes, to find what can only be described as a large metal pipe sticking out of my mouth.  As with a gum-piercer with a latex cover obscuring my entire mouth, that thing couldn’t have served any legitimate dental purpose.

They ended up giving me three shots of Novacaine, as she’d keep drilling into teeth that still had feeling. After the second one, they both left the room, probably to find more torture devices.

Meanwhile, as I sat there bewildered, some lady came in, handed me a small FM radio with headphones, and said, “Here, this sometimes helps.” Between being completely bewildered as to what was going on, and being unable to talk anyway, I nodded in appreciation and took the radio. It only got two radio stations–the same one that they had playing in the room, and a country station. But I figured it would drown out the noise of the drill, even though I think the implication may have been that the excruciating pain was al in my head, and listening to music would cause me to forget the fact that I had a huge hole in my gum and someone repeatedly taking a drill to a tooth that definitely wasn’t numb.

With the third Novacaine shot, the whole right side of my face was numb. And my eye felt really funny. When they left again, I looked in the mirror and saw that it was halfway shut, while the other one was wide open. This was quite a distressing sight, so I mentioned it to torture-assistant lady. She made some neutral comment whose tone indicated, “I don’t want to concern you anymore than you already are, but I’ve never seen that before and it looks pretty scary.” The real dentist came back in and told me it was nothing to worry about.

On top of all of it, the assistant lady had really sharp fingernails that were digging into my cheek through her gloves the whole time. And the filling they used smelled like rubbing alcohol. The smell of rubbing alcohol isn’t that bad, unless it’s wafting directly into your nose, in which case it’s horrible: partially the smell, partially nauseating fumes.

Finally, my interrogators decided I’d had enough and released me. I left unable to really control my lips, with my jaw in excruciating pain, an unexplained cut in my lip, and with my upper lip having a horrible burning sensation.

Moral of the story: floss and brush your teeth! Twenty-seven times a day.

8 thoughts on “Torture

  1. That sounds awful. I had my first cavity this vacation, too. My parents told me that the entire family has strong teeth, so noone has ever had novicane, “it’s not that bad” they said. So, no novicane for me. Just the drill, in my tooth. Aparently I did not get the rediculously strong teeth, I got the sensitive ones, and it hurt like hell. I started bawling like a 5 year old child in the dentist chair as the dentist proceeded to ask me, “it’s not that bad, is it?”. seriously? would I be crying if it was’nt bad? negative. Not only did it smell rediculously bad, they put this device around my tooth which did not allow me to move my lips, tounge or face in any way without getting poked with something. I am brushing my teeth every free second I have. If they ever tell me I have a cavity again, i’m running, far away, possibly to Canada.

  2. Oh, they use topical anaesthetic, too. It’s just that, applied to my gums, it doesn’t numb my neck muscles, or whatever else they want to jab their needle into.

    And Ashley, I can’t fathom anyone not feeling pain when they start to drill into a tooth.

  3. I’ve had fillings done without anaesthetic. But then I have a high tolerance for pain. I had some tests once that involved shooting electricty through my arm in various places to test how well it traveled (had to do with carpal tunnel) and at one point the guy doing it said “people are usually crying out in pain by now.” But I wasn’t.

  4. Pingback: Matt’s Blog » Blog Archive » Dentist, Part II

  5. That was months ago! My new one’s much better. 🙂

    I had a dream the other night, actually, that your dad ran a building that had the courthouse on the 2nd floor (I was trying a case for my law class, apparently? The people on the other side (I have no idea who was the defense and who was the plaintiff, nor am I sure what the case was about?) were trying to harm me, so, in self-defense, I lobbed a grenade at them and blew up their side of the courthouse), and a really fancy restaurant downstairs. (I had to get dressed up coming from court!)

    So I think your dad might not be too happy with me right now, at least until he can patch the hole in the courthouse floor?

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