Um, Excuse me?

I had my front teeth fixed yester day. This pleased me a great deal, I haven't smiled in a picture in about a year and a half because one of my teeth was broken off.

We had a number of translation difficulties, which happens every time I try something new. New undertakings, new vocabulary. This can be managed. It's when the cultural gap yawns that you find out what you didn't know.

He sat down and said, "You don't want mwah mwah wah, do you?*

So I asked him what that was. He scratched his head a bit and turned around and came out with a needle. Mwah mwah wah turns out to be Novocain.

So then I sat up straight, which alarmed the nice dentist very much. Dentists prefer their patients prone where they can strap them down when necessary, it seems to me. This was really a new revelation. People have fillings done in their front teeth without Novocain? A lot?

Listen, I am a battle hardened veteran of dental work, and I am an ideal patient. I have been known to go to sleep in the chair. I have a gold tooth which is a work of art+ because I am such a good little dental patient that I was once asked to be somebody's final exam.** I have a very high threshold of pain so they can make little mistakes all they like with no more than an inquiring look from me. Despite the horrowshow dentist of my youth who held my mouth open with a scissorlike thingie ++ which really hurt, I have no dental hangups of any kind. +*

But I do not consider Novocain to be optional. I have no plans to allow anybody to go into my mouth with a Black & Decker without some kind of painkiller. Why would anybody? I mean, other than a couple of creative kinks descibed in the DSM IV, I cannot imagine why anybody would court pain. Does it get you out of a couple days in Purgatory or what?

So I asked the nice dentist if a lot of people had fillings without Novocain. Oh, yes, he said, most people. So I shared with him that I was not like most people, indeed, I was very, very special, and thus required anaesthesia prior to dental work. He was very surprised. But agreeable.

Next week I get my molars filled (I wanted to start in the front because it has been driving me nuts for over a year) and I have already made clear that I fully expect Novocain for them, too. The dentist just shook his head. Agreeably.

Delicate hothouse flower, that's me. It's an American thing, no doubt. Oh, Beautiful, for Novocain, for pain free dental work.....

*mwah mwah wah is what words sound like when you don't know what they mean. Think back to the teacher's voice in Peanuts.

+ Every time I get a new dentist they admire my gold tooth. Sometimes it brings tears to their eyes, such a poem of dental work it is. But nobody can see it but a dentist so its value is somewhat limited. I wonder is, after I die, somebody will dig up my remains (of which it will be a part) and decide that it was in fact a religious artifact and conclude that I was thus a goddess. Probably, huh?

** when dentists get their board certifications, they need to find somebody to lie there and be worked on. It takes forever because at every step some Dental Examiner has to come over and Examine the work, make mysterious notations on a clipboard and then go to one of the other sweating candidates. I told my own candidate lawyer jokes to cheer him up.

++ and thus ruined my chances of ever enjoying "Edward Scissorhands"

+* Well, I did bite him pretty hard and was he mad. I did increase my vocabulary there, too, though not in the same way as yesterday. Dental work is so educational.