Jackie Wells-Fauth
I went to the dentist a week ago and something very weird happened. The hygienist looked in my mouth and said, “Good job! I don’t see any issues here.”
I nearly had an emotional meltdown all over her dental cleaning tray. That hasn’t happened before. In fact, my association with dentists has not been a pretty one.
And if you look at my teeth, you can see why. Years of dental neglect have given me battle scars: fillings, crowns, implants and sadly missing teeth. This monument to dental carelessness is sobering.
Keep in mind that a woman my age started going to dentists practically back in the days when you went to the local barber and let them yank out a sore tooth. Okay, okay, maybe not that far back, but I will say that the first dentist I went to (at the age of 18) pulled a tooth for me with very little pain medication and using a method that I like to call “put your knee into the patient’s shoulder and then lean back on all your own weight to get that stubborn cuss out of there.” That method resulted in the dentist pulling the tooth—or at least most of it. Suffice it to say I avoided the dentist after that.
For several years, my visits to the dentist were only when I had a toothache so bad that it lifted the hair off my head and made my eyes water and cross at the same time. Even today, when I try to describe some pain or other to someone, I inevitably say, “You know how it feels when you have an abscessed tooth?” Most of them don’t because they took care of their teeth, but some of my favorite sleepless nights were spent walking the floor promising God anything if He would just make the toothache stop. Usually His reply was, “Brush your teeth and you shall be saved.”
Finally, after years of neglect, I resolved to do a better job with my remaining teeth. I went to a dentist and I was set up with a hygienist. She looked in my mouth and said, “How long exactly, has it been since you had your teeth cleaned?” My reply? “What does that mean?”
For better than an hour she scraped, dug and scrubbed to try and clean years of neglect off my teeth. I have heard that some torture experts use dental equipment to extract secrets from their enemies. I think that hygienist trained with them. I would have told her anything she wanted to know if she had just stopped!
And then she made a critical mistake: She said, “I think we should give you a break. Come back in a week and I will clean the other side then.” The other side????? You guessed it; that week stretched into a further five years at which time I was forced back to the dentist for another abscessed tooth, on the side that hadn’t been cleaned.
Since then, I have gone to the dentist semi-regularly and there is usually a long list of things to correct. Dentistry has come a long way in my lifetime and they do everything they can to make it easier. But all the soft music, eye covers, and bubble gum flavored medications do not help when you hear that drill start up. There is no pain like the pain you get when you have a shot of Novocain delivered into the nostril (oh, yes, I’ve had that), and the only reason I let them put a needle in my mouth is because having dental work done without it is unthinkable. Those poor people who had their teeth pulled by the barber!
After years of playing Russian roulette with my teeth, I have finally learned the benefits of regular cleaning, brushing and flossing. Those teeth that are missing are the brave soldiers who gave their lives so that the rest of us could wise up and live clean.
So when I went to the dentist this past week, it was a heady feeling for the whole appointment to take about 15 minutes, for the hygienist and dentist to tell me what a good job I had done and for there to be no list of additional work that needed to be taken care of. A weird sensation? Yes, but one I really liked!
dropsinthewell 