The dentist is not my friend.

First off, I realize that I totally failed at writing episodes from my study abroad experience on here. It was a nice thought. Truly, it was. But realistically, it's not going to happen anytime soon. I am a busy bee. And also sometimes a lazy bee. But, perhaps, one day when I have mountains of time that I have no idea what to do with, I will return to this project and give it the justice it deserves. And when that time comes I will probably be elderly and decrepit and won't even remember what my name is, let alone the amazing things I experienced in Europe.
Alas.
Such is life.
So now, rather than expend this energy and time to record my glorious time in Europe, I am going to write about my recent experience at the dentist's office. Judge me. I don't care. It was horrible. And I need to get these negative emotions out of me somehow.

I used to have faith in the dentist. In my younger years, it was this faith that lead me to wander back into the caverns of his office as a believer, following and blindly trusting the smiling woman who wore blue pants and dangled face masks from her neck. She was an adult, she was a professional, and she was being nice to me. What wasn’t to trust? 

She led me to the chair and I sat down, happily. She leaned it back slowly and tied a humiliating blue napkin bib around my neck. Then, in conjunction with her superior, the dentist himself, she commenced the torture sequence. And I was glad for it.  As long as they gave me a free toothbrush and a puny package of floss at the end, all of this torture was fine by me. 

I was such a child then.

But I am no longer a child. And for this reason, my experience yesterday at the dentist’s office was different. When the smiling blue pants woman leaned back my chair, rather than submissively accept what was happening to me, this time, my brain began to question things. 

“What are you letting her do to us? You don’t even know this woman.”

“Quiet,” I told my brain. “It’ll be fine. She’s a professional.”

But as she slapped the enormously heavy mat over my chest and vital organs, and stuck the x-ray  machine right next to my mouth, I began to think my brain had a point. 

“There’s a reason this giant bib is so heavy it’s practically crushing our lungs,” my brain whispered. “It has to be thick enough to protect our vital organs from the poisonous radiation.”

With horror, I realized my brain was right. And then I realized something else.

“But what about you, brain?” I asked. “You aren’t protected?”

“Exactly.” 

Despite its position of being practically in direct fire of the radiation machine, my single most important organ, my brain, was left protected only by my meager skull. 

Something about this seemed wrong. If getting fancy teeth x-rays meant taking a free tumor home in addition to the toothbrush and floss, then I was out. No, thank you. That’s what I say to free tumors.

Yet, I did nothing. I just sat there, helplessly and mindlessly staring ahead as the smiling woman crammed a peculiar and pink plastic contraption into my mouth. After she felt satisfied with its position, she commenced to run back and forth from the computer to my mouth, snapping x-ray after x-ray.

After what seemed like years, she finished taking the tenth x-ray.

“All done!” she said, withdrawing the pink thing from my mouth, my drool stretching and clinging to it like a child being left at daycare. 

“Where are you from?” she asked casually as she wiped drool off of my face. “You have an accent, are you from Denmark?”

For a moment, I just stared at her. I was stunned to silence. 

“No,” I managed to squeeze out.

She couldn’t possibly be serious. Yet she was.

“Well, what country are you from then?” 

So it had come to this.

“Um . . . America?”

“Oh.”

She then tried to soften her invalid assumption by telling me the way I spoke made me seem exotic and exciting, but all I gathered from the exchange was that I must have some sort of speech impediment. 

Later, the dentist came in and informed me that I had two cavities. He described them to me in unnecessary detail, pointing to various screens displaying the fancy x-rays that had been taken earlier. When he finished, he turned and faced me.

“If you want, we can just get it done and take care of them now?” he said, his bloodshot eyes staring into my soul like I was a specimen he couldn’t wait to dissect.

“O.K.,” I said.

My brain was flabbergasted. “Have you lost your mind?” it screamed.

But it was too late. The first domino of the torture sequence had been tipped.

First, they flashed me a large number representing how much this torture was going to cost me. Then they made me sign a paper saying that yes, I will pay them this exorbitant amount of money, in full, or else. 

After I signed the paper, without warning, they laid me back, strapped a mask to my face, and told me to breath in deeply to allow the laughing gas to rush through my lungs. The gas began to take effect, and, right at the moment when all of my troubles began to slip away, a new woman shoved another clipboard in my face.

“Read it and sign,” she said.

 I read over it quickly, skipping words and phrases here and there. There is a possibility of allergic reaction. There is a possibility of seizure. There is a possibility of permanent facial nerve damage.

And with a joyful flourish, I signed the paper, promising that whatever happened, it wouldn’t be the dentist’s fault. What a joke. What a very hilarious joke.

But despite the fact that I had just surrendered my life into the dentist’s hands, I wasn’t bothered at all. Laughing gas is quite the quality concoction. It put all of my troubles and worries to sleep and I began to feel a sleepy happiness filling up my chest. Uncontrollable laughter started bubbling out of me, but, with the dentist’s hands crammed down my esophagus, it came to an abrupt and painful halt. I stopped laughing and started choking. The dentist noticed this.

“Breathe through your nose,” he said, grabbling another torture mechanism from his table. “Deep breath through your nose.” 

Panicking, I did what he said before I realized this was just part of his evil plan to get me so plastered by laughing gas that I would forget I was even choking in the first place. 

I felt like shouting, “I am a human being!” but I couldn’t. 

The dentist was shoving a grinding machine down my throat and the only sound I could hear was the grind of my precious teeth and the only feeling I felt was ouch.

Forty-three agonizing minutes later, it was finished.

When they finally raised the chair up and took off the laughing gas mask and the bib, I was so happy I didn’t even care when they failed to give me a free toothbrush. 

I got up from the chair, stumbled out to the receptionist’s desk, and paid her a small fortune for the torture I had just experienced. She smiled and pushed a receipt toward me.

“Sign here,” she said.

 I signed and headed down the stairs and out to my car, my mouth crying all the way. 

“Never again,” my brain said, through the fog of the remaining laughing gas and the throbbing complaints of my mouth. “Never again. Next time, you let me make the decisions.”