“He was working on other patients”? My sister asked in shock and disbelief when Bonnie, my wife, told her that I had made an emergency visit to the dentist. Apparently, her dentist is such a germaphobe that he doesn’t even shake hands let alone see more than one patient at a time during this interminable pandemic. It had never even occurred to me that my dentist wouldn’t be seeing multiple patients at a time. That’s why I planned to self-isolate in our bedroom for two weeks after the appointment. So I didn’t feel slighted until I heard that the next day.

I really, really didn’t want to go to the dentist. My experience with dentists hasn’t been bad or traumatic other than the pain in my wallet. But in the middle of a pandemic, I didn’t want to be the only person in a tiny room full of strangers not wearing a mask. However, a month earlier I forced a peanut into a cavity and it felt like it broke through the bottom of my tooth. What followed was a month of intense pain and many fruitless attempts to mitigate it. There were also many sleepless nights as well. After a month I pussed out. I just couldn’t take it anymore. Plus, I figured it would be better to get it taken care of before the weather cools and the virus starts spiking again. Oops, missed that deadline by a few weeks. But I made the appointment anyway.

Things Were off To A Rocky Start

Even before I left the house a pall was cast over the whole ordeal. As I was getting ready for the appointment – brushing, flossing, etc. – I was using a water pick and blew the crown off another tooth. The crown was 13 years old. I had it done in 2007 when I was 29 years old. I asked the dentist how long it would last and he said only about 10 years. 29 year old me heard 10 years and thought 10 years! That’ll be 40 years old Richards problem. I’ll let that guy deal with it. And just like clock-work, 10 years later, almost to the day that tooth started giving me trouble. I would find out an hour later that the tooth was rotting from the inside. But for now, I just put the crown in a little baggie, put it in my pocket, and walked to the dentist’s office.

The First Visit

The dentist’s office was in a dumpy little building a half-a-mile from my house. I walked through the door into a tiny little waiting room. The receptionist was on the phone when I walked in so I stood there looking around the room. It didn’t look dirty, but it didn’t feel clean. I examined all of the surfaces to find some tangible justification for the feeling I was having but there was nothing obvious.

A mom was waiting with her son. He looked to be about 10 or 11. She looked like she was in her mid-thirties. I continued to stand. The receptionist finally hung up the phone after a few minutes and asked me if I was Richard. I walked over to the counter as she pulled out forms for me to fill out and a laser thermometer to check my temperature. I worried for a second that I might be too warm from my 20-minute walk to the office. My temperature was only 98.3º, though, which made me wonder about the accuracy of her thermometer.

I took the clipboard and sat down across the room from the mom and her son. Someone called him back seconds later. I filled out the form and then I put it back on the counter and sat back down again.

Big Bird

As I sat there I noticed the woman sitting across from me had a great big nose. It was a detail I probably wouldn’t have noticed at all but that she was wearing her mask wrong and her giant nose hung over the top of it. She had the look of an aging “hot girl” who peaked in her early twenties but now was just past her prime. Again, a detail I might not have noticed but for the fact that she was pissing me off sitting there wearing her mask wrong. A few minutes later they called her back. I thought she was just going back to be with her kid but I found out later that she was being seen too.

They called me back just about a minute later and told me to go to the first room on the left. I looked down the hallway and saw 4 doors leading into individual exam rooms. That eased my mind slightly. Some other dentists’ offices that I’ve seen have a much more open floor plan that could spread germs more easily. Of course, any ease I may have felt was about to evaporate.

Into The Chair

The dental tech followed me into the room and started taking things out of drawers and preparing the room. I sat down on the exam chair and looked around the room while I waited. It was decorated in the style of early austere. There were no posters of teeth; no shelves with oral hygiene products the dentist was flogging. Just mostly bare walls coated in Navajo White paint. The wall to my right had a large 4 x 6 mirror mounted to it. I noticed I could see the counter behind me that the dental tech was working at. To my left was the x-ray gun mounted to the wall. It’s funny how dental x-ray technology is exactly the same as it was when I was a kid. The pictures are digital now but the rest of it is exactly the same.

As I sat there I could hear the whirring of the dentists’ drill coming from one of the other rooms. I thought about how the person he was working on, maybe the mom or her son, wasn’t wearing a mask. They were well over 6′ away from me but it still made me uncomfortable.

The X-Ray

The dental tech said she was going to x-ray my tooth. I said ok. I was watching her in the mirror. She was still at the counter doing something, she hadn’t even touched the x-ray machine yet. She said, “You can take your mask off now.” But the x-ray machine is still flat against the wall, I thought. Bring that thing over here, get everything ready, and then I’ll take my mask off. But she insisted so I reluctantly pulled my mask down.

I felt buck-ass naked sitting there with my bare face on display. She laid a lead bib over my chest and then fiddled around with the instruments a moment longer before she finally came over and shoved a piece of plastic in my mouth. Then she quickly ran out of the room and a second later I heard the x-ray machine buzz and she hustled back into the room and pulled the plastic out of my mouth. I pulled my mask back up the second the x-rays were done.

Photo Bombed

The dentist came in a few minutes later, just as I was snapping a selfie. As I hit the shutter button I saw him turn the corner into the room behind me. He was a tall thin man. From what little I could see of his face I guessed he was probably in his early to mid-forties. He had a dispassionate air about him. He reminded me of me actually.

After more than a decade in the carpet cleaning business, I began to feel the way that he looked. I took great pride in my work – always tried to do a good job – but I didn’t care about what I was doing. As far as customer service was concerned my stance was something along the lines of don’t bother me; just let me do my job and get the hell out of here. I got that vibe from him too. He didn’t lecture or shame me for the atrocious mess going on in my mouth. He just spoke matter-of-factly with a sort of callous resignation.

He looked at the x-rays and then poked around in my mouth for a second and said I needed a root canal. I already knew I needed one so I was sort of like, ok, what are we standing around for, let’s get crackin’ doc, some of us are in pain. Of course instead of saying that I pulled the little baggie containing my crown out of my pocket and asked him what we could do about it. He stuck his steel pic in my tooth. Then he said, “It can’t be saved, it’s already all squishy, it needs to be extracted and we do that too.”

Squishy? My tooth is squishy? Is that a medical term, doc? Squishy? It was an unpleasant image but I would come to learn later that it was an apposite description.

Getting To Work

With everything diagnosed the dental tech began laying out all of the tools. The doctor left the room, to work on another patient, I think. I could hear the sound of his drill coming from another room. It took a few minutes to set up and then we got to work. The dentist stuck me in the jowl with the novocaine and then left the room again. The dental tech finished what she was doing and left too. So I took this opportunity to snap a picture of the tray with all of the tools on it, you know, just for posterity. And wouldn’t you know it, that damn dentist walked back in the room just as I hit the shutter button…again. The first time was slightly embarrassing but this time I just felt like an ass.

Let the drilling begin…

The dentist tilted my chair back and started drilling. The dental tech sat to my left doing her thing. I liked her. She was Johnny-on-the-spot with that spit sucker. A lot of dental techs aren’t so vigilant about it but she sat there poised over me scanning my mouth for spit. When she saw some she pounced on it. Meanwhile, the dentist was raping the shit out of my tooth with his little drill. I just sat there as still as I could, trying to focus on the sounds of 90’s country music coming from the lone speaker mounted in the wall in front of me; the only thing on the entire wall. I flinched. He said, “The novocaine was wearing off,” as he stopped drilling. Then he asked me if I was doing alright. I said yes and to just keep going.

I’m Not A Masochist. Really.

The last time I had a root canal the root wouldn’t accept the novocaine. I would flinch and the dentist would stop drilling, reinject me, start drilling again, and again I would flinch. We went through that cycle 3 or 4 times until I was numb all the way up to and including my scalp. The nerve never went numb and I told him to stop sticking me and just drill. I white-knuckled the armrest of the chair and just powered through the pain. I was still numb from my 2 pm appointment at 11:30 pm that night. And then all of a sudden at 11:30 pm the sensation began to return to my forehead. It felt like a horizontal line of warmth and feeling moving down my face like when a cartoon character eats a whole bunch of hot peppers or something.

So when this dentist said he was going to reinject me I told him to just drill. He said he didn’t want me to be mad at him. I told him if I was still numb at midnight I would be mad at him. He injected me anyway and started drilling again. He would drill with one bit and then switch to a different bit. I could tell because they all felt different in my tooth. One of them, the biggest one, vibrated my whole face up into my temple.

Should We Be Doing This Right Now?

He was drilling and spraying water. The water, mixed with spit and tooth dust and god only knows what else, was splashing off my teeth and spraying all over my face. I lay there thinking about the other people in the office also laying there without masks on and everything that was spraying out of their mouths and all over their faces and into the air.

When he reached the bottom, he told the dental tech to take another x-ray. He wanted to make sure he got it all and I could get on board with that. Then he left the room again.

It was during this bit of downtime that I became aware that the HVAC system for the whole office was in the room that I was sitting in – without a mask on. It was a very warm day, and the air conditioner was on. I could hear the motor running. I could hear it sucking the air through the intake below the furnace door. It was the very same air that at least three other maskless people in this office had recently exhaled. The air, used by everyone in this office, gets sucked through my room. And then what? I scanned the room for the register. It was directly above me on the wall to my left. The first exit on its return to the atmosphere was right above my maskless face. But I had no choice but to lay there…buck-ass naked.

The Drilling Is Over

After a short eternity, the doctor returned. He examined the x-ray and then he and the dental tech resumed their positions over me. The dentist poked around in my tooth some more but he was done drilling the root. The only drilling he did after that was to grind down the top of the tooth to prepare it for the crown. When he was satisfied with the job he had done he told his assistant to “mix it up” and I took that to mean the cement he was filling my tooth with. She handed him a little cup filled with purple schmoo and he began packing it into my tooth.

A few times he briefly held a UV light to my tooth. I assume it aided in setting the cement. When he would use the light the dental tech would hold a transparent yellow ping pong paddle in front of his face. It made me laugh because while she was protecting his eyes from the UV light with the paddle, the paddle was reflecting UV light into my eyes. It’s one of those design flaws caused by not testing products in real world applications.

As he shut the overhead light off and pushed it up and away he mumbled something about the schmoo he just filled my tooth with. I didn’t catch what he said and I didn’t care to follow up about it. Instead, I just pulled my mask up and got up out of the chair.

Thank God That’s Over

I walked down the short hallway to the receptionist’s desk to schedule my next appointment and pay for my root canal. She set me up for the following Thursday and then told me I owed $975. I handed her my card and as she took it the phone rang and she answered it. She was busy talking to the patient on the other end of the line while she ran my card and placed both copies of the receipt on the counter. I signed one and left the other where it lay. I walked out the door into the waiting room. As I walked the 3 or 4 steps across the room to the door the receptionist stopped talking to the person on the phone just long enough to say goodbye.

I stepped out of the office, into the hallway, and untangled my headphones. I plugged them into my phone and started a Spotify playlist as I walked out the door of the building. As I was walking down the street thinking about everything that had just happened I realized that they never gave me a copy of the estimate. They showed it to me and told me how much it would be for the root canal and the crown, and also how much it would be to extract my “squishy” tooth. They also said they knocked $180 off the crown but they didn’t give me a copy of the estimate. That would end up being a problem the following week. But I wasn’t going to worry about that now because my tooth was coming alive and starting to hurt.

The Pain Has Only Just Begun

As I walked the 1/2 mile back home the pain began to intensify. As I turned the corner into my neighborhood I began to panic a little. If it hurts this much now, while I’m still numb, what’s it going to feel like in an hour, or 2 hours?

I walked in the door of my house and immediately went to the kitchen sink and washed my hands. Bonnie walked in just behind me and asked what the dentist said. “What they said”?, I said, “I just had a root canal. They raped the shit out of my tooth.” She was a little surprised that they just did it right then and there. As soon as my hands were dry I took 800mg of ibuprofen and took a hot shower. The pain just kept getting worse.

This Ain’t My First Rodeo

I’ve had lots of root canals before and never felt pain afterward. In fact, when I had my first at 18, everyone said it was going to be awful; the worst thing I’ve ever been through. And to be fair there is a reason people compare every miserable experience to a root canal. But it wasn’t bad. There was no lingering pain and I ate pizza for dinner that night. So this experience had me worried. Was something wrong? Or was this what everyone had warned me about 24 years ago?

It was after 5 pm now and I didn’t know what to do so I called the dentist. I told the receptionist that the pain was intense and getting worse. She put the dentist on and he was like, yeah that happens. This guy reminds me of when Collin Jost would play Pete Buttigieg on SNL during the Democratic primary last year. He basically told me to take ibuprofen and stop being such a little bitch. I hung up and sat perfectly still staring into space. The pain was intensifying. There was no escaping it. It wasn’t the kind of pain that hurts and then subsides for a bit before returning; it was constant. And then finally at about 6:30 pm it peaked out and started to ebb. By 7:30 pm the pain was gone completely.

I slept like the dead that night. It was the first night in over a month that I went to sleep and woke up with no pain. I wished that I had made the appointment sooner. A month ago would have been good but a year-and-a-half ago would have been better. But that’s in the past now. The important thing is that I’m taking care of the problem. One appointment down – two to go.

The Second Appointment

“Wait, what? Two more appointments? I thought it was just one?” I said as I jumped out of the chair lunged towards the reception window. The receptionist had just dropped this bombshell on me when she asked if I wanted to make my next appointment now or after my tooth extraction. I set the clipboard holding the dentist’s cancellation policy form that I was signing down on the counter. The receptionist had forgotten to have me sign it last week. Yeah, that’s not all you forgot lady.

I was pissed. Not just because I was going to have to come back and expose myself for a third time. And not just because that meant an additional 2 weeks of isolating by myself in my bedroom away from my family. But because they didn’t tell me when I was there the week before that it would be three appointments. I told the receptionist that my last root canal was done in two visits.

She started to get snotty and said, “We’ve been in dentistry for 20 years and root canals are always done in three appointments.”

Perhaps I’m wrong about the two visit root canal, but it really doesn’t matter if I am or not. It’s irrelevant; totally beside the point. The point is that someone should have explained the whole procedure to me before we started. And then we could have avoided this little argument about how many visits it should be! This whole situation could have been avoided with a little communication.

A Promising Sign

I sat back down, furious. They called me back a few minutes later and sat me in the same room as before. I noticed immediately that the A/C wasn’t on. It was much cooler outside than last week so it wasn’t necessary. Of course, that doesn’t stop people from running the A/C. My next-door neighbor runs their A/C all year long. One evening I was sitting in my backyard and I got cold. Just as I got up to go inside I heard the A/C come on over the wall. I pulled up the weather app on my phone. It was 61º. 61º? And their A/C is on? There’s no way their A/C could cool their house down to below 61º Why not just open a window if you’re too warm in there? I guess some people like to burn their hard-earned cash. So I wasn’t holding out hope that the A/C in the office would stay off for very long.

There didn’t seem to be any other patients in the office so that made me feel better. The dentist and the dental tech both came in right away and they got to work. He started off by drilling out the temporary filling that he put in my tooth the week before. He sculpted my tooth and made a mold of it, and set a temporary crown. That all went by painlessly. Then we got to work on pulling the “squishy” tooth.

The “Squishy” Tooth

I still don’t know exactly what he meant by “squishy” but I think it may have had to do with the fact that I could press it with my tongue and feel it move down into my gum. I discovered that neat little trick the night before. It seemed that the tooth was in worse shape than I realized and it made me feel better about yanking it. I didn’t want to have it pulled but knowing that it was basically rotting from the inside out made it a no-brainer.

The dentist swabbed my gums and cheek with a Q-Tip covered in pink schmoo. When I aksed him the week before what it was he didn’t really have an answer for me. I asked if it was benzocaine and he said, “Yeah, well something like that, some kind of caine.” I got the feeling that he didn’t want to talk but also that he genuwinley didn’t know or care what he was using in my mouth. It sort of made me feel like a sucker for wanting to learn all aboout the different chemicals I used to use to clean peoples carpet. And you just walk on carpet.

He started sticking me with the syringe almost immediately. Stabbing my gums and then bending the needle this way and that. It seemed like he used a lot more novocaine this time than last week. It certainly took longer to inject me that’s for sure. He finished and put the syringe down. Then he stood at the counter behind me playing Candy Crush or just staring at the wall. I don’t know for sure what he was doing. After a few minutes, he asked if I was numb yet. I told him I was numb instantly. He replied that he wanted to make sure it really took.

Cutting It Out

What happened next was the single most unpleasant hour of my adult life. I’ve had teeth pulled before but I don’t remember ever experiencing anything like this torture. The dentist started out trying to just pull it out with pliers but he gave up on that approach rather quickly. I thought that since I could move the damn thing with my tongue that it would be a cinch to just yank the bastard out but it wasn’t. So he busted out the drill and started drilling.

Now, I can’t be certain but I think he actually cut my tooth in half. Then he busted out the old Craftsman 1/4″ Flathead and shoved it into the crack he had just drilled and began prying the tooth apart. I could feel and hear every crack and grind. The dentist got up to get something and the dental tech asked if I could feel it. She said I shouldn’t be able to feel anything. I told her that I was numb but that I could feel and hear grinding and it was just like nails on a chalkboard.

This went on for a whole hour. About halfway through the novocaine started wearing thin and I flinched. The dentist stuck me again and put my nerves back to bed. Then it was more grinding, more cracking. I could feel little bits of tooth flying around inside my mouth. A few landed at the back of my throat and when the dentist stopped to change tools I tried to move them to the front of my mouth. I sat up and I motioned to the dental tech to give me the vacuum. She held it close to my mouth and I latched on with my lips letting everything in my mouth get sucked out. I laid back down and the dentist proceeded.

Things Can Always Be Worse

I just lay there with my eyes shut tight thinking about all of the people throughout history that had to endure this with no anesthetic at all; all of the children that fought in the civil war and had limbs removed with nothing more than whiskey to dull the pain. It was a harrowing thought. About another half an hour later I flinched again. The dentist was prying something with all his might and I could feel it all. I expected him to stop and stick me again but he didn’t. He just kept going. Then he pulled his tool out of my mouth and said, “that’s the last one.” I opened my eyes and just thought, thank the fuck Christ it’s over. But then I also thought what if he didn’t get it all. But just as I had the thought he told the dental tech to do an x-ray.

She threw the bib over my chest, shoved the plastic thing in my mouth, set the gun, and then ran out of the room. When she came back in the doctor was right behind her. He looked at the picture and said that he had gotten it all. I was so relieved.

The Bag of Guaze

The dental tech gave me a baggie of gauze and showed me how to fold it and put it in my mouth as she stuffed a folded up a little square of cotton in my tooth hole. She told me to change it every 15 minutes until it stopped bleeding. Jesus, I thought. Every 15 minutes? I took the little baggie from her as I asked the dentist what to expect about pain. He said it wouldn’t be bad because there’s no nerve in my tooth hole like with a root canal and to just take ibuprofen.

What the fuck is it with this guy and ibuprofen? I’ve been to dentists before that couldn’t wait to write me a prescription for some kind of gateway to heroin but this guy’s just like, suffer bitch. It’s fine, I wouldn’t even fill a prescription if he wrote me one. It’s just his total lack of concern for my well-being that bugs me. Maybe after a few visits, I’ll level up and earn compassion.

As I walked through the waiting room, past the receptionist’s counter she said good-bye and I could tell that we had animosity between us from the argument that she started earlier. Fuck her I thought. One more visit and I’ll never have to see her again so who cares if we have beef. It’s not as if there is anything remarkable about this dentist that would make me come back. At least nothing remarkable in a positive way.

2 Disgusting Hours Begin

As I stepped outside the building I started my music. When I opened my phone I saw that Bonnie had texted to see how I was doing. I told her I was on my way home. As I turned the corner I saw her turning left into the church parking lot ahead of me. I was a little disappointed because I was enjoying the walk home. It was probably for the best though. The gauze in my tooth hole needed to be changed anyway, so I pulled up my mask and got in the car. It had been in my mouth for probably ten minutes already. It was already soaked with blood and spit and it was only going to get grosser after a 20-minute walk.

I washed my hands and changed my gauze as soon as I got home. It was 1:51 pm and I sat down at my computer and started working. I had barely done anything when the timer went off to change my gauze again. So I got up and went to the bathroom, spit the bloody wad of cotton into the trash, and then folded up a new square and shoved it into my tooth hole. Then I sat down at the computer again. It seemed like no sooner had I sat down than the alarm went off again. This cycle went on for 2 hours. Every time I spit the gauze out I hoped to see less blood than the time before but it didn’t seem to be letting up.

My Black Hole

I looked in my mouth and found a gaping black hole where my tooth used to be. I shined a flashlight in there and saw that it was pooled with blood. Bonnie suggested that I might be pulling out the clots every time I take the bloody wad out. She asked me if it looked like there were clots on the gauze. I didn’t know but I jokingly said they were in the trash if she wanted to look. She went into the bathroom and pulled a bloody wad of cotton out of the trash. (She’s a trooper.) She brought it to me and said, “Yeah, see this? Those are clots.” I was disgusted and impressed. She suggested I stop with the gauze and see how it does. I was glad to if for no other reason than it was unbelievably intrusive into my workflow.

The pain was minimal just like the dentist said it would be. I took Advil to keep the swelling down. Over the course of the next two weeks, I would take a small flashlight into the bathroom and look into the hole where my tooth used to be. It looked like a bottomless black pit. But as the days passed and it began to heal it became pinker and less painful when an errant bit of food found its way into the gap.

Now that that tooth is missing the function of that side of my mouth has changed. I can fit my tongue more easily into my right cheek now but as far as chewing goes it has become somewhat useless. I still have the teeth above and behind my new tooth hole. But I am missing my very rear upper molar. So now I have this weird skip set of teeth where both of my back top and bottom teeth have no matching tooth to grind up food with. That’s going to be a problem. Still, it’s better to not have a rotten tooth.

The Final Visit

I was sitting at my computer the day before my appointment to have my new crown installed when that horrible receptionist called. It was about 12:30 pm. She informed me that my crown came in early and asked if I wanted to come in today instead of tomorrow. I thought for a moment because Bonnie and I were taking our oldest son to the DMV to take his driving test at 2 pm, and then asked what time today? She said 5 pm. I said that was perfect and we hung up. Daylight saving time ended 3 days ago so it was nearly dark when I arrived at the dumpy little building where my dentist’s office is located.

The Temperature Facade

I walked into the office and just as I sat down I saw the receptionist walking out to the waiting room with a thermometer to take my temperature. It seemed odd and terribly inconsistent. She didn’t take my temp last week so why does it matter now. There’s no point in taking safety precautions if you’re not going to apply them universally.She walked toward me and I stood up to meet her halfway. She held the gun to my head and pulled the trigger but the thermometer was broken. So she hustled back into the reception area to get another thermometer. This one worked and apparently, my temperature was acceptable because she just walked away without telling me what it was.

I sat back down and noticed that there was another A/C intake in the lobby right next to where I was sitting. Egads. That means that the air people are exhaling in the lobby – like Big Bird with her mask under her nose -is also being blown throughout the office where it’s breathed in by all those poor maskless sons-of-bitches. Whatever. It’s the last appointment. Let’s just get through it.

3rd Date, Can’t Back Out Now

About ten minutes after I arrived a hygienist came out of the back office and met someone at the door. She wouldn’t let her through the door until she had taken her temperature and asked her some questions. I thoiught that was very strange. Nobody did that with me. And why was a hygienist handling this type of front office procedure? Perhaps it was because the receptionist was busy laughing and talking loudly on the phone with a patient that had been in earlier today. Apparently, just after she had called me to come in early, the office lost power. The person she was on the phone with was unable to pay for his cleaning or whatever he was in for because they couldn’t process his card. So she was calling to collect.

Once the hygienist approved the patient for entry she brought her in the back and told her to sit in the last room on the right. The receptionist hung up the phone and asked me if I had lost power today too. I told her that I hadn’t. She was surprised and said, ” Oh, I thought you said you lived right around the corner?” I felt like she thought that she caught me in a lie but I wasn’t about to explain to her how electrical grids are laid out.

This Fuckin’ Receptionist

Over the little counter in the back office where you pay and schedule your next appointment, they’ve hung a piece of plexiglass from the ceiling as a barrier between you and the receptionist. Now, I couldn’t see exactly what happened but the receptionist somehow managed to knock it down. I might not have even noticed but for the commotion, she caused alerting the whole office to what she had done. She couldn’t fix it because a screw went missing.

I began to grow impatient and started noting the time every few minutes. After 20 minutes of sitting in the waiting room, I still hadn’t been called back. The 90’s country music playing softly in the background had lost the nostalgia it had 3 weeks ago. Now it was a bit annoying. I was getting irritated and nothing was helped by the receptionist on the phone with an insurance company feeding one-word responses to the computer on the other end of the line.

You Never Want To Be Someone’s Last Appointment

Further back into the office I could hear the dentist’s drill. It’s the sound of me not being called back anytime soon. It’s about this time that I start to regret my decision to take the earlier appointment. After 16 years in the service industry, I can tell you that you never want to have an appointment at the end of someone’s day. You’re not going to get their A-game. I started to wonder why they had me come in at 5 pm anyway if they were not ready for me. But then I remembered that the power outage put them behind schedule.

At the 27 minute mark the entire staff, the dentist included, were all enlisted to try to find the missing screw. Apparently, it’s lost forever. As a result, it can’t be rehung and so that counter is now a hotbed of disease and danger. The receptionist’s solution is to have everyone come into the waiting room to pay and make their appointments. So now there are two patients standing in the lobby with me and neither of them is the chick that the hygienist interrogated at the front door. That means that there are at least four patients, including me in this office right now. Three of them, presumably, had their masks off at the same time. The A/C just shut off so all of their nasty COVID breath is just hanging in the air back there.

It’s been 30 minutes since I showed up for my appointment and another patient just walked in the door. It’s getting crowded up in here. 2 minutes later they finally called me back. They directed me to the first room on the left just like before and I sat down on the chair.

I’m Finally Called Back

The dentist came in and started pulling tools from the drawers in the counter behind me and placing them on the tray. I heard the sound of stainless steel hit the vinyl floor and the dentist made a “whoops” noise. I heard him bend down and pick up the tool but I didn’t hear him set the tool on the counter. And I didn’t hear the drawer open again as one might expect to hear one someone has to get a new tool out of a drawer to replace the one he dropped. He paused a moment behind me and then placed more tools on the tray. I can’t be sure, but I think he placed the tool he dropped on the floor right onto the tray!

The crown installation was relatively quick. I mean relative to the amount of time I had spent on this appointment so far that day. 22 minutes after I was called back I was walking out the door. I spent the next two weeks isolating in my bedroom.

What Did We Learn Today Children?

It was a long 5 weeks that, strangely, didn’t seem out of place in 2020. Spending 5 weeks alone in my room; wearing a mask when I went into any other part of my house; Facetiming my wife in the next room just to chat felt like a natural progression in a year that has taken any and all norms and run them through an industrial shredder. That’s not to say that I have accepted the past 5 weeks as normal. But in the scope of this year, it’s the type of event that I’ve come to expect. I hope I never have to do anything like this again and so the overarching lesson here, kids, is: take care of your teeth so you don’t have to spend 5 weeks and $2500 in the middle of a global pandemic getting them fixed!

Not long after my last appointment, the weather cooled down and the numbers from our County Health Department began to rise as I expected that they would. The state ordered a shutdown of all non-essential business, again and I am so very grateful to have gotten in and out of this whole ordeal during a lull in viral activity. I only hope that I can get through the rest of this pandemic without having to raw-dog it in a tiny room full of strangers again.