I should have married a dentist. I dated a couple of them. When Keith told me that I had been in the running as a possible marriage partner, I didn’t even know I was being considered. I thought we were just dating. The reason he chose “her,” he said, was because she was Jewish. Well, Ha! Guess what, Keith – I had my parents’ DNA analyzed and I found out this year that I’m part Jewish too!
Too late. But, honestly, I need a dentist – a GOOD dentist. As you can see by the photo, my mouth, the inside of which I’ve labeled for identification purposes, needs a lot of work. Sadly, my experiences with dentists have been rather poor – oh, wait – I’m the one who’s poor. They are expensive. I just need a dentist, a really GOOD dentist, that I can afford. Is that even possible?
When I was a kid, my parents took me to Dr. P (I don’t want to reveal his whole name, because he’s still practicing, which is kind of scary, considering how old I am).
What I remember about Dr. P is that he had very hairy arms. He was my first dentist, so I could make no comparisons to other dentists who might not have had hairy arms. I don’t know where Dr. P received his training, but he’s the only dentist I know who would sit behind me and rest the palms of his hands in my eye sockets while he worked on my teeth. Until I had Dr. P, I never considered that eye sockets could be comfortable places to rest the palms of your hands.
What’s interesting about my Dr. P observations are the discoveries I made. Did you know that when your eyeballs get squished to the back of your head, you hallucinate? Maybe that was his reasoning. I could concentrate on all the visual designs and colors I saw inside my collapsed eyes and those visuals would take away my anxiety about how many cavities he would find as he examined my teeth. Maybe hallucinating would take away the pain I felt from having his hands crush my eyeballs. Maybe covering up two cavities in the face would mean less cavities in the mouth (you’ll think of anything to explain away what you perceive to be bizarre behavior).
It took the better part of an hour for my eyes to pop back into place after each visit and for me to be able to see anything clearly. What made matters worse, though, was when I got contacts. I’d see those hairy arms come toward my face and his palms come toward my eyes and I would squeeze my eyes shut REALLY HARD hoping I could prevent my contacts from being shoved to the back of my head.
Unfortunately I don’t have the other Dr. P’s (Dr. Phil) reasoning skills. I’d come out of his office hanging onto doors, looking like Dracula with my eye makeup leaking down my face (yes, Dr. P, take what you want; just leave the eye teeth). I had memorized the path to the bathroom where I would spend the next couple of hours trying to locate my contacts. Many times I considered using my mother’s tactic, the one she used when she was a little girl. She found a very effective way to keep dentists away. She bit them.
Light bulb moment – if you keep your hands inside your patient’s eye sockets, you make it more difficult for them to bite you. So – does anybody have any dentists for me? I promise not to bite as long as they don’t plunge their hands into my eye sockets.