Woot Canal

I've been thinking about my teeth recently. No particular reason. Well, there's some reason I suppose, I'm just not entirely sure what it is. Anyway, my first semester here I got a toothache for the first time, and I put off doing anything about it for months. The pain was terrible -I couldn't concentrate on anything but this molar, so finally I called my mom and asked her to set me up an appointment with our dentist for when I would be home over break.

Side note: At the time of this toothache I had the brilliant thought that a toothache was like a headache, only it was in your tooth. Then I wondered how I could possibly know this, because I have never had a headache.

My first day back home my mom says my appointment is for tomorrow, tells me the time, and then says that I'll have to drive myself over there. I'd never been to the dentist alone before and I wanted to keep it that way, but my mom had started working, and while she was worried we'd become latchkey children, I still had to drive myself. Anyway, I had to take her van and go to Aloha (which is a city in Oregon and not pronounced like the Hawaiian hello/goodbye, but more like uh-low-uh) all by myself.

The waiting room was different, or at least the movies were. Growing up they had always had Timmy the Tooth and The Return of Jafar among other movies, but they'd switched them out with newer ones, which was rather distressing.

I went to get the tooth taken care of, and partway through the drilling my dentist announces that it goes all the way to the nerve and they're going to do a root canal. At this point I was trying to remember what a root canal was exactly, while taking into account all the times I'd heard horror stories about them. So before I knew it they'd put a small tarp in my mouth and the dentist was sticking a series of larger and larger metal files into the cavities of my mouth and wiping what looked a lot like blood onto his gloves. And it didn't hurt a bit.

I have a bad habit of laughing when I am at the dentist's. The whole thing is just so absurd to me that I can't help it. There are four hands in my mouth! Somebody is pulling out the roots of my teeth! Do you know those spit suckers they use? The really big ones - not the ones you close your mouth around, but the ones the assistant uses throughout the procedure so you don't die? Well, this one time the assistant kept accidentally catching it on my lip and when she pulled it away it made an incredible honking sound, like there were geese in there with me. I started laughing then -I just couldn't help it.

My sister, who I have previously referred to as sister M, is now to be known as Bony M. If you've seen the documentary Touching the Void you'll know why. Anyway, she said that once (and I hope I'm remembering this accurately) when she was at the dentist's she was listening to the headphones they give you, but it was a comedy station, and she kept laughing. They thought she was in pain, so they gave her a lot more shots than she actually needed. She had us listen to it afterward -this routine by Woody Allen about a moose - and I highly recommend it.

Anyway, I went, I got the root canal, and then I asked to have a prize from the toy basket, just like how I still ask for a sticker when I go to the doctor's office. I felt like I deserved something for what I'd been through, so I picked out an orange warm fuzzy. The woman at the desk gave me a tissue for my drool and a paper with my bill on it. I went out to my car, buckled up, opened the bill, and freaked out.

Over $1500! For a tooth. For the love of all that's good and decent, why!? I drove home then, sobbing uncontrollably. I was in no physical pain, but $1500?! All I could do was say "I hadda halv a woot canal" over and over while I drove and cried. I'm fairly certain I ran at least one red light in the process. I arrived home still sobbing (a very very very rare occurrence for me) and no one was upstairs to greet me. I stood in the front entry bellowing until someone downstairs heard me and came up to investigate.

M-Lite: what's wrong with you?
me: I hadda halva woot canal, an it caws fiwfeen hunwed dowwarrrs!

I'm going to interrupt here and say something very important. I did not get to have a hamburger. That's right - no hamburger for me. I say this because every other trip I've ever taken to the dentist's has ended in our mom stopping at Dairy Queen on the way home and buying us food. It's not wise to eat when your mouth is still numb, but we'd do it anyway - you just have to eat your burger very carefully to avoid eating your own tongue. I associate going to the dentist's with a numb mustardiness combined with pickles, and this time I didn't get to have a hamburger. That's what's wrong with this whole scenario.

That's really all I have to say, except for one more side note, which is that I have a piece of floss tied around the pinkie finger of my right hand. Tomorrow it will have been there for two weeks. There's no reason for it being tied around my finger, but now I'm curious to see how long I can keep it there. Perhaps that's why I've been thinking about teeth lately.