My Morning With The Gouger

Good afternoon. I just awakened from the fallout of my sedation dentistry appointment at 7 am. The dentist’s protocol involved advance administration of the tranquilizer Halcion, plus some other med, plus nitrous oxide, plus, of course, novocaine. All of this for a filling. I apologize for none of it. I’m one of those weirdos who is extremely sensitive to oral pain, and psychotic about the sound of a dentist’s drill. They zonked me out pretty good this morning, but I was all too aware of the sound and feeling of the whirring drill hitting my tooth. If I hadn’t been in a Hunter S. Thompson state of mind, I would have jumped out of the chair and clung to the ceiling like a cartoon cat. As it was, I kept making a fist and felt like somebody strapped into a seat in a crashing airplane.

The effect of the drugs, they told me, would make me forget everything. My wife drove me home and put me to bed, where I slept hard until 3pm. Turns out the only things I remember about it was THE EFFING DRILL GRINDING INTO MY TEETH. That, and looking down to see my left hand clench and unclench, spastically.

Here’s a short clip of the time Lisa Simpson went to the dentist. It’s me:

If I ever have to do this again — which I’m NOT because in addition to brushing and flossing regularly, as I now do, I am NOT going to bite down on popcorn kernels and destroy old fillings — I’m going to ask the dentist to allow me to listen to hard rock music via Air Pods, to counteract the sound of the drill. I really am to the dentist, what Indiana Jones is to snakes. If I heard some other person telling this tale, I would inwardly laugh at them for making such a big deal about the dentist. But I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy — OK, maybe on a couple of them — the feeling of being in that dental chair this morning. (Note well: the dentist and his staff were wonderful. There was no deployment of the Gouger, and if it had not been for the heavy sedation, I could not have gone through with the procedure.)

I am the only one in my family to be like this about the dentist, but it turns out that this is actually a thing: oral defensiveness. It’s not psychological, but physiological. It seems to be connected to the same factors that make me a supertaster (someone who can discern many more flavors than ordinary people, because I have more taste buds). Interestingly, two of my children are very, very picky eaters, and don’t like strong tastes or unusual textures. Never have. The older of the two was diagnosed as a child with sensory processing disorder. We didn’t bother having the second one diagnosed, because we knew what we were looking at. They’re both supertasters too. Whereas they have an aversion to strong tastes and unusual textures in food, I seek that out. But they’re both fine with the dentist, whereas their father turns into Woody Allen having to storm the Normandy beaches on D-Day.

The body is so very strange. A Czech friend horrified me a story from the Communist dentistry of his youth. He underwent two root canals without anesthesia, because there was no anesthesia in the People’s Republic. I told him that I would be jacked up on tranquilizers ‘n stuff. He responded:

That’s probably the right way to go about it. Otherwise you could end up like me putting dentists into the same category with concentration camp guards. I still remember their names, faces … sadistic bastards! Dental hygiene was a collective activity. You’d go with your entire class. The dreaded day. Everybody sitting in the waiting room, names read, kids disappearing in the offices … then the unmistakable whine of painful dentistry drills … a day inevitably ending up with some poor kid barricading himself in the toilet. I remember their names too. Cowards!