My first childhood dentist was a good dentist. Everything went fine. Part way through first grade we moved when my parents bought their first house forty miles away in what seemed to me like the end of the earth. A brand spankin’ new 3-bedroom rambler that cost $13,500. Electric everything including baseboard heating. Nuclear plants were being built everywhere and soon electricity was going to be so cheap that it wouldn’t be metered.
I was taken to a different dentist. Little did I know that he could have been the basis for Laurence Olivier’s character in Marathon Man. To this day, my memory is sketchy. Was he arrested for being a guy who got his jollies from inflicting pain on children or did my parents just start taking me to a different dentist? He was in his fifties then, and has almost certainly died by now. One drawback of being agnostic is that I cannot be certain that he’s spending eternity in hell.
I went to other dentists before moving away to college. Always traumatic but I was young and went where my parents took me. But after I moved away, I was free to neglect my teeth, only going in for treatment when it was absolutely necessary, as with an abscess. Not surprisingly, my dental health suffered. Finally I stumbled on to a caring dentist who really, really did not like inflicting pain on his patients. Lots and lots of Novocain, way more than other dentists had given me. And nitrous oxide. It does little for pain per se, but wonders for fear and anxiety.
I’m a big guy. Usually fairly tough. But when I sit in a dentist’s chair, I’m eight years old again. My #4 tooth needed a crown so I went in this morning for the prep work and a temporary crown, a custom one will be ready in two weeks. But today, the better part of two hours in the chair. The high-pitched whine of the drill. Poking. Prodding. More drilling. The whole time breathing deeply of nitrous oxide. Just barely able to let the dentist work because the full-grown man in me was able to keep the scared 8-year-old at arm’s length.
My thanks to Horace Wells who pioneered the use of nitrous oxide for dentistry in the 1840’s.
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