The Dentist Appointment

Any post that starts out with the title of dentist and has the creepy dentists from the Fairly Oddparents in it means that this can’t end well.

For about fifteen years, I’ve been seeing the same lovely, funny, and nice dentist. He was a great dentist, paid lots of attention to me, I adored him. But about a year ago, he elected to retire and go play golf. So that left me with the partner I had never met before. Mom had met him when my sister chipped her tooth and the normal dentist was booked, and said he was perfectly nice. I just wasn’t impressed. And when I got to him the first time, I thought he was just kind of… boring. Not evil, not that he did anything wrong, he just bored me.

So on Tuesday I’m forced to go in for my six-month cleaning with the Gremlin at about 5:00, and she gets a dental assistant I’ve had before and is perfectly lovely. They sit down and get right to work while I have a seat with a new dental assistant. I should have known it wouldn’t go well when the first thing she did was drop my file. On the ground. Then she goes right to work without putting that napkin thingy on my shirt. At least she gave me good toothpaste. Then again I always question the toothpaste because if you scroll down one or two posts, you’ll know I don’t like fruit and for some reason toothpaste tastes good if you make it fruit flavored??? I mean come on, mint has been used for hundreds of years (I read that fun fact somewhere, but I can’t remember exactly when or where. I tried Googling, and that’s not turning up the mint fact I want.) to freshen breath. What effect does a strawberry or cinnamon flavor have on breath? Go for the traditional stuff, people. That’s the goods. Don’t fix what isn’t broken.

The lady finishes cleaning and flossing my teeth, and then she starts putting this stuff on them. Originally I thought this was a new brand of fluoride until she starts using water on it and the straw thingy. Then she actually GETS UP from the chair and leaves me there with my mouth open and this stuff that literally tastes like vomit (No, seriously. She puts it on and I thought I had vomited in my mouth.), and gets up and gets the bag of those cotton rolls. She shoves a bunch of those in my mouth and the entire time I’m thinking “Oh my god lady what are you doing no really what are you doing???” until I finally get a break to ask. It’s some sealant stuff that SOMEONE booked and never told me, and I had to have twelve of them done. At one point, she almost choked me with one of the cotton rolls after earlier she had made me choke up on water. I was getting annoyed.

She sloppily puts the fluoride on finally, and by this time, it’s about 5:45. I haven’t even seen the dentist yet. He looks at my teeth, hardly says a word to me, and then spits a bunch of stuff out at the incompetent dental assistant about my teeth that I’ve heard hundreds of times, and then gets up so they can get my mom and dad and tell them the same stuff. By the time we leave it’s 6pm and I want to go home. AND THEY ALL KEEP TALKING.

This is one of many reasons why I don’t want to be an adult. All they seem to do is talk. They’re like the Illuminati and they know EVERYTHING.

So finally they let me ride home in Mom’s car while Dad takes Gremlin home, mainly because she lost a tooth (it got sucked up the straw) and we needed to get the tooth fairy stuff for that night, and I needed a break from them. And basically I told her the contents of this entire post and complained about my day. She suggested I go to her dentist maybe, and she said he’s cool and the office is like a spa. And they have free bottled water. Given my recent kick on drinking more water because I became addicted to it while I was sick over Christmas break, DO WANT.