{"id":3928,"date":"2016-12-31T09:59:38","date_gmt":"2016-12-31T14:59:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.allandouglas.com\/blog\/?p=3928"},"modified":"2025-04-21T01:56:37","modified_gmt":"2025-04-21T05:56:37","slug":"adventures-in-dentistry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/adventures-in-dentistry\/","title":{"rendered":"Adventures in Dentistry"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">Another article from my moldy-oldies file, but when originally published folks did find it entertaining, so I&#8217;ll pop in in here.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Yesterday I renewed a relationship that has for many (many) years been neglected.\u00a0 No, not neglected: avoided;\u00a0 stringently and purposefully avoided.\u00a0 I made a trip to a dentist.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright\" style=\"border: 0px none; margin: 5px;\" title=\"Dentist\" src=\"http:\/\/farm8.staticflickr.com\/7217\/7157879531_4c9171b1bb_o_d.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" \/>You see when I was a wee lad, long (long) ago, my parents would take me to the dentist every year for a check-up.\u00a0 And it seems he would always find a cavity or two to drill out and fill.\u00a0 Early on they used Novocain and I don\u2019t remember it as being particularly torturous \u2013 not fun by any means, but not like being stripped naked, covered with honey and tossed into a fire ant hill.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>But at some point they started using Xylocaine, Lanacane and someothercaine, which for some reason or other didn\u2019t seem to work on me, or at least worked VERY slowly.\u00a0 Dentists with a waiting room full of patients to process that day were not inclined to let me sit and allow the anesthetic to work, so the dental visits became more and more painful and less and less frequent.<\/p>\n<p>Finally I went in one time as a young adult and the dentist was something out of Little Shop of Horrors (the remake) He did not use a topical anesthetic to numb the jaw a bit first, he went straight for the needle.\u00a0 And while he proceeded slowly, waiting a bit (about 2 seconds) for each jab to work before going on to the next, he may as well have been using tap water.\u00a0 I swear it felt like the guy had put a nail gun in my mouth and was shooting 3 penny nails in there.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/bOtMizMQ6oM\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>That was the last time I went to a dentist.<\/p>\n<p>Until yesterday.<\/p>\n<p>Even though I have been fairly diligent about brushing and flossing to keep my teeth healthy, time caught up to me and I found myself in need of professional help.\u00a0 Our pastor\u2019s wife (Bobby) works as a dental assistant in a clinic and recommended that I come see the doctors she works with.\u00a0 I trust her, so I went.<\/p>\n<p>Sparing you the gruesome details, I was in the chair for about 3 hours.\u00a0 No root canal, but some fairly extensive dentistry in the form of grinding and reshaping.\u00a0 A good part of that time was us waiting for the anesthetic to take hold.\u00a0 It took 3 rounds of injections to get the site numb, and he was particularly humane about it all.\u00a0 When it came time to fill the one major cavity, Dr. Mitchell put in the batch of amalgam (filler) and Bobby asked if he would need more.\u00a0 He said, \u201cYes \u2026 LOTS more\u201d and I thought sure I heard the \u2018beep-beep-beep\u2019 of a concrete truck backing in.\u00a0 It took three batches to fill in the form he\u2019d set up where the back half of my molar used to be.<\/p>\n<p>After it set up some, he removed the form (he called it a matrix) and spent quite a while shaping the glob of metallic stuff into the shape of a tooth, checking to be sure it \u201cfit\u201d right to the tooth above it then polished it up all pretty and smooth.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve lived with it for a couple of days now and aside from a distinct metallic taste and a sensitivity to cold in that tooth, which he said would happen but would go away after a few weeks, everything has been fine.\u00a0 No misalignment, no pain (other than an achy jaw-joint that evening) no bits breaking off or floating out of who knows where. \u00a0And my tongue is no longer being lacerated by broken teeth.\u00a0 Good Job Doc!!\u00a0 It won\u2019t be so long before I go in for a check-up now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Another article from my moldy-oldies file, but when originally published folks did find it entertaining, so I&rsquo;ll pop in in here. Yesterday I renewed a relationship that has for many (many) years been neglected.&nbsp; No, not neglected: avoided;&nbsp; stringently and purposefully avoided.&nbsp; I made a trip to a dentist. You see when I was a &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/adventures-in-dentistry\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Adventures in Dentistry&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[19],"class_list":["post-3928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-adventures"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3928","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3928"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3928\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21480,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3928\/revisions\/21480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}