My Day at the Dentist

A couple of days ago I had the pleasure (I don’t know how true that sentiment is) of going to the dentist. About a month ago I broke a tooth and I have finally got around to going in and getting it fixed. I really don’t mind the dentist and my dentist is a pretty cool guy.

Well this all started out by me having to take off early from work to get to the appointment. (This provokes a question: Why do dentist have the hours 9 to 5? I guess its ok with them if you take a sick day to see them or even worse take a vacation day. If you ask me their hours should be from 6:00am to 10:00am, take a break, and then back for a 5:00 pm to 9:00 pm shift. Works for me, how about you?) So I get there at 1:00 pm for my appointment, sign in and go sit down. Just as I start getting into HGTV the receptionist says “Tom, do you have an appointment today?” I think to myself “you’ve got to be kidding!” So as she is scrambling around to fit me in the thought occurs to me that maybe I should just re-schedule. I bring this up to the receptionist and she insists it’s ok and that they will be able to get me in. I should have insisted on re-scheduling.

A few minutes later I am ushered back to my room. As I sit down the dental assistant apologizes for the chairs’ headrest being broken, but assures me that it shouldn’t affect the work that the dentist needs to do. I should have insisted on re-scheduling! The stinkin’ headrest kept sliding the whole appointment. I guess when she said that it wouldn’t affect my appointment she meant that it wouldn’t affect the dentist monkeying around in my mouth.

After this episode the dental assistant started to prep my mouth for the dentist. She put this rubber thing in my mouth and said that it would help relax my jaw. Relax my jaw?!? You should have seen the size of this thing. If you have roller blades go look at the brake on them, that’s how big this thing was! (no big mouth jokes) Then she puts this paper contraption over and in my mouth. This thing was anchored by rubber bands that fitted around my teeth. Yes, they feel real good. It’s at this time that out of no where my heart rate starts to increase and I feel like I can’t breath. It was unbelievable; I was having a panic attack. I never have panic attacks. I really should have insisted on re-scheduling. Well after talking myself out of the attack, I started to relax some.

It’s at this point that I hear the nurse say “I can’t get it to stop bleeding”. This peaks my curiosity. Since I can’t feel anything, I’m wondering how bad could this be? Well it was bad enough that they had to seal everything back up and tell me that they would have to finish fixing my teeth once the blood vessel they hit healed. So I ask “How long will that be?” To which the dentist replied “one month”. I should have really insisted on re-scheduling. What a way to spend my sick time.

So now I sit here at work with a sore mouth, from I assume a healing blood vessel and with another dentist appointment in a month. I sure hope they don’t forget and if they do I will insist on re-scheduling my appointment