Let it be known to the world: the truth of the matter is; I disdain popcorn and will never eat it again!
Today, I conquered one of my greatest fears; a trip to the dentist. I haven’t seen a dentist in close to 15 years, well really something like last century.
The dentist is certainly not my friend and I’ve been avoiding him the best that I can.
The problem occurred last month when the left side of my mouth began to hurt severely for reasons unknown. I called my brother Benjy & talked to his dentist who prescribed me penicillin for a couple of weeks. Since that time I’ve been taking ibuprofen, pain killers & liquid cocaine to soothe the gums.
The last time I saw a dentist was in the early 1990s was when I had to have a tooth pulled and they refused to give me pain killers, only numbed me up just enough to give it three big yanks and out it came!
That was the time period when I ended up going to a dental school in downtown Chicago for all of my dental needs. The dentists there, students-in-training, seemed to behave more kinder and gentler, caring and understanding, as opposed to the dentist of the olden day who drilled and pulled teeth and filled cavities to absolutely no end.
I remember my first and perhaps only dentist. The only stuff we shared besides the bills was our last name, though thankfully we were not related. He was middle-aged, wore bi-focals and played God-awful music whenever he drilled my teeth or filled a cavity.
When he numbed me up with a 10-foot long hypodermic needle that hurt and hurt bad, sometimes it drew blood, when there wasn’t supposed to be any blood drawn. In the old days prior to AIDS, he never wore gloves, perhaps a surgical mask, but that was it.
Comparatively so, dentists are a lot like bored policemen; always trying their hardest to strike up a conversation with a patient/dead body while either the coroner or the hygenist (in my case) is working on them.
But these days I hear that dentists aren't as terribly bad as the ones portrayed in The Three Stooges comedy shorts (films) or like the dentist in the original film, “Little Shop Of Horrors,” as I hear they do their best to try and save teeth.
Today’s visit included an X-ray of my left side of my mouth and then my dentist coming in and telling me what was exactly wrong with me. Sometime soon I have an intimate date with an oral surgeon who gets to pull out a broken wisdom tooth in the back of my mouth. There is some irreplaceable nerve damage too, so in in light of that, I will never eat popcorn again.
I suspect that when I visit the oral surgeon, that’s when the real pain will begin.
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