“Uhm,” I say to the dental tech as she covers me with a lead apron, “I just want to warn you. This might take a while.”
“Oh?” She asks. She is hooking this H-U-G-E thing to a little bracket and approaching me with it. It looks nothing like the bitewings they’d used at the office I used to go to. Is she planning on putting that in my mouth?
“Yeah. I have a really strong gag reflex. I mean really strong.”
“Oh, that’s all OK.”
“No, seriously. I’ve had techs get mad at me because of it.”
“Really?” She is sympathetic. “That’s not right. Okay, open up.” Yes indeed. She thinks that thing is going in my mouth.
“What’s this?” I ask, cocking my head at The Great Big Thing.
“Oh, it’s digital. The picture will show up over there.” She shrugs to the open laptop behind her as she tries to position this piece of equipment in my mouth.
“Arggggggarrrrrggle, bleah!”
“Hm.” She steps away, the Great Big Thing still in her hand, now much wetter.
“Yeah.”
She tries again. I gag again.
“Let me try something else.” She disappears and comes back with Something Else on the bracket.
“The film is a little smaller than the digital device,” she explains while fitting it in my mouth.
“Sorry,” I say after gagging and spitting it out.
She leaves again, and comes back with this blue foam thing she wraps around the bottom edges of the plate. I guess she’s thinking maybe the sharp edges are the problem.
Place, gag, spit out, repeat. This happens three times before I manage to hang onto it long enough (chanting dontchokedontchokedontchoke in my head, punctuated by the occasional no! when my mouth tries to get rid of this foreign object) for her to set up the machine and sprint out of the room to hit the button.
“There, that wasn’t so bad,” she says as she comes back in the room.
“Pwaaaah.”
She catches the thing as it leaves my mouth and goes to develop the film. She returns a few minutes later as I’m telling the dentist what’s up with my teeth, a look somewhere between dread and apology on her face.
“It didn’t come out. We’re going to have to take another X-ray.”
-----One week later-----
Back in the chair again. The problem I originally came in for has been fixed, now we’re doing some sort of general inventory of my teeth. My last dentist has sent over my records, including every single X-ray they ever took. The entire office is impressed with me because of this—that particular dentist is famous for not giving complete records. They want to know what I said to make him give them everything. I'd love to oblige them, but I can't remember the actual exchange.
Before the dentist gets started, they have to take panoramic X-rays of my mouth. I’m not fussed.
“Those don’t bother me,” I tell the tech. “It’s the bitewings that give me grief.”
She looks at me oddly.
“But that thing where you stand up, put your chin in the bracket, bite down on something, and the machine just kinda wraps round you and takes pictures? No problem.”
“Yeah, those are great….but we don’t have one of those.”
Oh, God. We gaze solemnly into each other’s eyes.
“Bitewings?”
She nods.
“I hope you don’t have anything else to do this afternoon,” I sigh.
The procedure goes like this: Set-up, gag, remove, set-up, bite-and-concentrate-while-she-sprints-for-the-button, buzz, gag, spit, repeat. About a third of the way through, she calls the dentist in.
“Could you help us out, please? Hit the button the second I clear the door?”
“Did you try numbing her tongue?” He asks.
“Yes. Doesn’t work.”
“What about salt?”
“Salt!” She leaves my field of vision. “I forgot about salt!”
Salt?
She hands him a Q-tip. He rubs it on my tongue. It tastes like plain table salt. He places the film, then sets up the machine. And the clouds part, the light shines down, and the angels sing. I feel like he could take all day to set up if he needed to. There’s no gagging, not even a hint of it. This feels perfectly fine. They both leave the room, she takes the picture and they come back. I’m still holding it in my mouth, marveling at how not bad this feels. He takes the film out of my mouth.
“That’s amazing! Salt did that?”
“Yep. Or maybe I’m just that good.” He winks, smiles, leaves the room, and the tech continues taking pictures of my mouth. She has to salt my tongue before every X-ray or I choke--we experiment with salting every other X-ray and the results are not good.
When I finally leave the dentist’s office, I am extraordinarily thirsty. I stay thirsty until about Saturday. Four days later.
-----One week later-----
I am back in the chair for a cleaning and the filling of a cavity in between two of my upper back teeth. The cleaning takes a while because I haven’t been to the dentist in a few years (lost faith in the other guy, teeth didn’t hurt until the middle of August of this year, so I never got around to finding another one). At one point I think they’re done with the scraping part and are about to move on to the brushes.
“Done with the metal hook?” I ask.
The dentist leans over me with another, smaller hook.
“Oh,” I say.
“You know what this metal hook is called?” he asks, waving it at me. “A sickle.”
“Awesome,” I squeak.
“Though in my hands, it’s a gentle sickle.” He winks from behind the mask.
After the cleaning it's time to fill the tooth. It’s waaaaay back there in the upper part of my mouth. I’m tilted back in the chair so far I feel like I’m hanging upside-down. There’s a drill, a hose, some kind of padding, another hose, all in my mouth. I’m okay with it until he puts a metal band around the tooth and starts to pack in gauze. Oh, here we go.
“Uh-oh.” He says. He starts taking gauze out. It’s not helping. I make some sort of inarticulate noise, an attempt to speak.
“Hang on!” He takes out more gauze.
“Thawngkt?” I say. Then, more clearly, “Thalt!”
“Salt!” The tech dashes into another room and comes back with a little cup of salt and a Q-tip.
Rest of the filling goes fine. Gauze, metal whosit, equipment…hell, they could have put everything in the room into my mouth and I wouldn’t have gagged.
I think they’re going to have to make a notation on my chart to have salt nearby for every visit. And I’m going to need to remember to carry a great big bottle of water with me to the dentist’s office.
Hi gang,
I have to go back to the dentist this afternoon to check on last week's boo-boo tooth. I'm leaving at 2:30, and I think I'll be back by 3:30, but I don't know what other adventures he has planned for me besides this follow-up visit. Here's hoping I don't leave there with a numb mouth. Again.
--V
There was a session at BlogHer ’10 on Saturday that I am kicking myself for not going to. It was called “Little Fish in a Big Pond – Understanding and Loving Your Small Blog.” I wound up not going partly because of time mismanagement (again. That plagued me all weekend. Not like I have clock on my cell phone or anything), and partly because I felt I didn’t need help understanding or loving my small blog.
But now after reading this post about the session I’m really wishing I attended, and not only because one of the people running it was Celeste, whose blog I read and comment on and who comments here once in a while. Found her blog through NaBloPoMo a couple years back, met her in person for the first time at the People’s Party on Thursday night.
Luckily BlogHer has transcripts of the sessions, and after a quick search I found the one for “Little Fish…”. I started skimming through it and berated myself for not keeping better track of time, and for deciding not to show up late to the session even though lateness appears to have been totally acceptable. There was a lot of stuff in here that I guess I needed to hear. I’m having a lot of “me too” reactions for things like:
Well, now I’m going to go back and read the transcript in-depth. I guess things I need to add to the “do” and “don’t” list for next year’s conference are: “Do keep track of time. Don’t worry about walking into a session late.”
You know what? I just read a post by ThreeSeven that makes anything I have to say about BlogHer ‘10 seem trite and a bit frivolous. Please do go read it.
I would like to say, though, that the Keynote for the International Activist Blogger Scholarship Recipients was particularly moving and thought-provoking. I tend to take my own freedom for granted, and these women’s stories put my little piques into sharp relief. These women? They have difficult lives, they live in difficult situations, and they are doing something to change it. And because what they’re doing is so dangerous, there was an embargo on taking their photos during the keynote.
I came, I saw, I wanna go again next year.
Things I’m going to do next time:
Things I’m not going to do next time:
The sessions were great. I’ve already started putting into practice some of the things I learned – like that picture above. The original picture was a little cock-eyed, because the building in question was down the street and the terraces were a few floors below me. Here, let me show you:
Better still? I don’t even have to download this. It’s been hanging out on my laptop for over a year, waiting to be noticed.
I’m going to introduce an Ideas Jar in my house--an idea from another one of the sessions. I will put words and phrases into it—cut-outs from magazines, quotations from books I’ve read, stray thoughts I have that I manage to write down before they leave, things like that—and when I get stuck for material I’m going to take something from the jar and work with it. I may grab the camera and work it out that way. I may write. Dunno.
I also had an idea for a joint blog I’d like to do with my sister. I don’t know if it’ll pan out. More on that later when (if) it develops.
I met lots of great people. You might notice some new blogs in the blogroll to the right of this post. Arts and Dafts is an art blog by Ry, an artist from Brooklyn. She takes great photographs, among other things. And then there’s Feast After Famine, by Dana in Washington D.C. She used to be a journalist, struggled with infertility for a while and beat it into submission. She has four children now. And then there’s Amiee of mamieknits. She lives in Los Angeles, is a knitter, a mother of twins, and an absolute maniac on the dance floor—I’ve seen that last part with my own eyes. She reminds me an awful lot of one of my best friends from high school (who is now an Air Force wife living in New Jersey. Are you out there, lurking?).
I met these three at a BlogHer meet-up at the Volstead. I’ll write about that tomorrow, because it’s quarter after ten now and I really should go to bed.
In an unrelated note, I put eggs on to boil before I started this post and forgot about them until I heard something go “click” in the next room about 20 minutes ago. All the water had boiled away. I’m lucky I didn’t set the house on fire. Can you burn hard-boiled eggs? I guess I’ll find out when I can touch them without losing my fingerprints.
FOUND CAT Small gray declawed female.and then my cell number. They only give three free lines for Found ads, and they center-justify the type so that it's very hard to get much info into those 3 lines. Fourth line costs $7.77. What a racket. I had to keep rearranging the words to get them to fit into the free space, but I made it. The online ad was much more generous, space-wise. I added her approximate age, when and where she was found, and my email address. I held back the info on being spayed, thinking it might be something they could tell me to ID their cat, along with eye color, specific coat coloring, etc.
