TurtleHead

On Wednesday I went to the dentist with Gal Smiley and I HAVE A CAVITY.

I freely admit I am being a big giant baby about it.

You’d think after all this time I’d be kind of used to it. I have terrible teeth. Each of my back-most molars has been filled twice. On the top, one of my second-to-back-most molars was lost to a root canal about seven years ago. The other second-to-back-most molar on the top has been filled three times — actually, it may even have been four times, now that I think about it — and seems destined to disintegrate any day now.

Compare these to Sir Monkeypants, who spent at least a third of his life skipping the whole dentist thing, and who has a perfect, unfilled, cavity-free set of teeth. But I’m NOT BITTER. Much. I just hope the kids got his teeth.

The last time I had a filling, I was just a few weeks pregnant with Gal Smiley. The hygienist at my old dentist’s office broke off part of one of my fillings (in the molar with the four fillings — probably she couldn’t tell what was real tooth and what was fake) and it had to be redrilled and replaced. The dentist (nicknamed “The Butcher,” and not just by me) didn’t want to fill it until after the Gal was born because he had this thing about fillings causing undue stress on pregnant ladies, but the broken off filling was KILLING me, so I begged him to fill it. That turned out to be a big mistake, because the filling (after the job was “finished”) hurt more than the original hole in my head, and after sobbing in Sir Monkeypants’ arms for 24 hours, I went back and begged The Butcher to do something, anything. So he filed it down and fiddled around with it while I was sobbing in the chair, and I’m sure the whole time he was thinking, “THIS is why I don’t like to do fillings on pregnant ladies, they get SO HYSTERICAL.” The end result was something I could live with, but which still aches to this day.

So I’m not too jazzed about the whole cavity/filling thing, even though I’ve parted ways with The Butcher (See you! Bye bye! Don’t bother to write!) and now have a very nice dentist who doesn’t have any scary nicknames that I know of.

But still, I am shaking in my boots.

I really hate the drilling. Of course, you can’t feel anything, but it’s the sound that is so awful. That, and the smell. Ugh, the smell. I’m shuddering.

But you know what’s even worse? The needle for the freezing. Man, that sucker hurts. It hurts so much, that I’m tempted to try the drilling without freezing — my mother always swore by it. This time, though, the cavity is in a really inaccessible place, between two teeth, and so the dentist has to drill right up into the centre of my tooth and then drill sideways out of it, and that sounds like freezing is probably going to be a good idea.

I’m also not so fond of the cotton they pack in there. It tastes gross and is very uncomfortable.

Oh, and the cavity is on one of my back-most molars, and in the past when I’ve had one of those filled, I’ve had to have my mouth clamped open with weird plastic bits covering everything. I just remembered that friendly little contraption right now. Boy, sounds like a big party, doesn’t it?

At least I’ll get an hour or so of child-free time. A little holiday for mom, if you will. Not quite as good as other famous “mommy time” events such as grocery shopping alone, or having my annual pap smear…but I guess it’s one thing to look forward to.