Adventures In Dentistry

copyright 2001 Dale Hansen no reproduction without permission

Another hole in the head


When I first began with my present company, I had been some time without dental insurance. My teeth had suffered for that, and I thought I should get them cared for. There was some pain spurring on that decision. I had a tooth that needed to come out.

Let me explain; I have had broken bones, I have had “blunt trauma”, I have hung by wrist from a nail (long story), I had a garage door fall on me when I was seven. I deal with pain with a scandinavian stoicism and with a great deal of denial.

If it’s not in my mouth.

If there is so much as a glimmer of discomfort, the smallest touch of pain in my mouth, I handle that with all the aplomb, dignity and restraint of an infant with colic.

I once had a dentist ask me what he could do to make my visits easier. I told him to let me mail my teeth in.

I have seen bulls with nose rings. I am told that the nose it the most sensitive part of a bull’s anatomy (yeah, that was my first thought too!) and that the ring is there to lead the bull around. I never understood why anyone would want to put their hand so close to bull snot, but I understand from the bull’s perspective. One of those horrid dental probes into a tooth cavity will make my body will go anywhere. If the tooth isn’t quite numb yet, my body will go in the first direction it can find, usually straight up.

The current dental cavity lead my body into a dentist’s chair. The new insurance required a new dentist.

1. Olga the dental dominatrix

I called every dentist within a five mile radius of my home. No one was accepting new patients. I finally found one that would take me and only seven months away. I expanded my search zone. I finally found one a few miles from my house that would take me right away. I made an appointment with Olga. I told the receptionist on the phone that I had a tooth that needed to come out.

Olga’s last name, even if I could remember it, wasn’t pronounceable anyway. She walked into the room after I had been sufficiently prepped by her staff.

In traditional Spanish bullfights, picadors come into the ring and stab the bull multiple times before the matador arrives. The bull has lost blood, and been badly injured enough to tire before the matador does. This is a more accurate description when I say I was “prepped”. My mouth had more hardware in it than my car and there was a plastic tube for suction trying to pull my tongue out by it’s roots.

Around this equipment, I attempted to garble that I had a tooth needing to come out.

She introduced herself in heavily accented english explaining she was born and raised in Russia. She then grabbed my jaw bone, pulled it down somewhere around my kneecaps, and stuck her entire head - up to the shoulder - into my mouth.

She came back out again long enough to gather a tool belt, extension cord and some plaster before diving right back in. I heard the sounds of major construction echo off my sinus cavities and her voice ringing in the background, which I took as a Russian equivalent of “Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho, It’s off to work we go…”

Pickaxes, chisels and pneumatic devices of such torturous imagination as only the dental industry can create came and went into my mouth After several lifetimes, and three more trips for supplies, she and most of the equipment came back out and pronounced final judgment.

"It will have to come out.”

When in a dental chair, with your mouth forced open, various instrumentation, cords, and tubes running mazes over your gums, one of the most unpronounceable and potentially embarrassing words you can attempt is “DUH”.

After I sponging myself off, while Olga cleaned the dental chair, she explained that she did not do extractions, that was for an oral surgeon. She did not, if fact, do anything to my teeth nor recommend anything for the pain, but she did process my paperwork and charged me my co-pay.

I left the office with a referral and a life sized x-ray in my hand and the faint taste of sawdust in the back of my throat.

2. Smile, you’re on candid x-ray

Dental x-rays are a business card sized piece of film that dentists take great pains to make and charge a great deal to develop in order to give to the next dentist for the purpose of being thrown away and a new set ordered.

I had considered walking into the surgeon’s office without the x-ray, or to create an image on the computer and print it out on a business card, just to have something to carry, but every dentist who throws away an x-ray must first study it carefully, then decide it won’t tell him anything worth knowing.

I made an appointment with the oral surgeon for the week after next. I was only able to get in so quickly because it was an “emergency”.

I spent most of those two weeks holding my cheek and moaning. This made for awkward situations during meetings and phone calls. I did not again attempt the word “DUH!”

When the day came, I proceeded to the oral surgeon’s office and signed in at the reception desk. When I stood in Olga’s office as her staff called the oral surgeon’s staff I heard someone say that there was an extraction to be performed, so I was surprised when the first question the receptionist asked was; “And what are we having done today?”

I handed her my x-ray and told her it needed to come out.

She opened the little envelope and pulled out the little x-ray. She held it against the light, hummed and murmured and grunted to herself as she studied it. “OK,” she said, replacing the film and handing it back to me, “give this to the nurse.”

Can an illiterate person spot another illiterate person? She had the same expression I did when I looked at it, and it made no sense to me. My dog didn’t care what it looked like, he lost interest when he sniffed it, but he wore the same expression as the receptionist and I both did.

On the wall near her desk, at about eye level was mounted an object whose mechanism I could only guess at, but being in an oral surgeon’s office, had to involve some torturous method of operation.
I had no idea what it was, but i was about to be introduced.

At this point the nurse arrived and ushered me into the examination room. “Have a seat,” she said, “what are we in here for today?” I handed her my x-ray and told her it would have to come out. She took the envelope, removed the film and held it up to the light. I think her ah-hums and ahs and murmurs sounded a little more informed than the receptionist’s but it may have been wishful thinking. She taped my x-ray to a lighted panel and left, while I waited alone in the room reading a flier on proper hygiene.

About 47 times.

I felt I probably should memorize it, because if I actually knew it I wouldn’t be in an oral surgeon’s office would I?

The surgeon walked in, and sat for twelve minuets and twenty-three seconds looking at my x-ray. Having fulfilled this part of dental interoffice respect, he asked for the envelop, replaced the film into the envelop and threw the whole thing away.

He wanted to get new x-rays. HIS x-rays. To accomplish this, I was escorted back to the receptionist’s area and came face to face with the mysterious wall mounted object of torment, while his nurse was standing in front of it like Vanna White showing off a new car.

It turned out this device was, in fact, an x-ray machine. It was an x-ray that took a picture of the entire mouth. How this works is the victim (sorry I mean “patient”) places his or her chin on a chin rest, and the machine whirrs around his or her head taking one long picture. This apparatus was mounted perfectly for some one about six foot two. Next to it was a box for the shorter patients. I saw nothing for someone six foot six.

I rested my chin on the strap by leaning over. This was not acceptable as the jaw needs to be level with the floor in order to get a good image, so I craned out my neck and hunched my back over to reach my chin to the strap.

The motorized x-ray camera took an image of the left side of my face and then slammed my left shoulder. Undaunted, it backed up and gathered a bit more speed, slammed into my shoulder again. It showed the same obsessive compulsive tendency twice more before the nurse was able to shut it off.

I needed to remove about four inches from my height.

To conform to the machine, I had to bend deeply at the knees. In order for my knees to bend that far, I had to splay out my legs against the wall. To keep my shoulders away from the device I had to extend my arms out along the wall. I looked like a bug on the windshield of a race car. I had the impression of trying to embrace the entire wall arms and legs, with my face strapped into rotary x-ray camera that despised my shoulder.

Did I mention that this machine was mounted to the wall in front of the receptionist’s desk? The desk in the lobby where everyone else was waiting? It wasn’t the people laughing at my posture that bothered me as those that kept trying to look away, having the same mannerisms and expressions of some one trying not to look at a train wreck.

The pictures came out nice. The surgeon brought me back into this office and ahhhed and uhmmmed at this new set for a while and declared “It will have to come out.” By this time, sarcasm had gotten the better of me and I said “Really? What a surprise! Are you sure?”

“Oh yes, “ he said and held up the x-ray and spent about twenty minuets telling me why it had to come out, and how it came out, and other extractions he had done, and work he had done in school, and how he never had a puppy as a boy even though he was really, really good, and a whole list of other things I really didn’t want to know.

I finally agreed with him that it would have to come out. He had an opening in six weeks.
I pointed out that I had a much more immediate opening, and that the pain associated with it was considerable. He prescribed me a pain killer.

Codeine.

A lot.

I don’t remember most of the next six weeks, but eventually the time for the tooth to come out arrived. I went back the surgeon’s office an laid back on his couch. The couch raised up like a barber’s chair, going a lot higher than my comfort factor. I was suspended about five feet off of the floor.

Then the hardware showed up.

There was a clamp for my right thumb to be sure I was still breathing, wires for my right wrist to monitor pulse and blood pressure, various other instruments, wires, dials and items that taped, glued or sucked their way onto my right arm leaving the left arm free. For a moment. My left arm was to have a device of it’s own; a brace, a metal device that straps to the arm, having the sole purpose of preventing the elbow to bend. I am sure that it is a vital piece of medical equipment. It looked like a tribute to the Marquis DeSade.

A suction tube was hung in my mouth like a fish hook, and large instruments of torture and discomfort where placed on my chest. I was as well and as thoroughly trapped as if I where buried under a carefully arranged avalanche.

My nose itched.

I couldn’t bend the left elbow, the right arm had more wires running in and out of it than the phone company, my chest was the keeper of instruments that I desperately wanted to remain sterile.
I tried to tough it out, I tried to extend my nose out to my shoulder, but it wouldn’t reach and the more ardent attempts threatened the stability and cleanliness of the unknown devices on my chest.

The itch got worse.

It took me several minuets to get all of the wires from my right arm to fall into place long enough to get a good nose rub out of my upper arm, several more to put it all back. Then the surgeon was ready.

I discovered what the brace was for. It had an opening into which the surgeon placed a hypodermic needle and inject a burning hot rock the size of a baseball into my arm. It hurt, it stung, it burned.
I didn’t even have time to say ouch before I was fast asleep.

I awoke in a sitting position, and saw the surgeon handing my jacket to my wife. I knew he was giving her instructions from the look of concentration on her face and they way she kept nodding., I couldn’t understand why he was giving her instructions about my jacket.

Perhaps the drugs hadn’t worn off yet. I felt so clever at having figured that out!

He insisted that I be helped out of the office, so with him on one side and my wife on the other, I was led like a small child out of the office. Me. In the prime of my life, the peak of my active and strong years, I was being treated like an enfeebled old man! I was angry, I was insulted, I wanted to rip my hand from the surgeon’s grasp, but I couldn’t quite figure out how.

I did notice that the tar in the parking lot looked rather soft and inviting. I didn’t fall after all, but I would dearly love to know how I got into the car.

Giving a little lip

To close the hole he left in my jaw, the surgeon used sutures. I had to return in four weeks to get them removed. It makes sense to me that if they were inserted while under anesthetic, they should be removed the same way. He did not have my extensive understanding of logic, however and proceeded to remove them while I sat in his chair trying not move.

After the first few tugs, I decided that the removal didn’t hurt at all. Then too, I may have been distracted by the fact that he kept putting these gems from my mouth onto my lower lip before reaching in for another. My lip became a staging area for a disgusting dental treasure hunt.

Next time, I'm leaving it in!