Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

When your dentist pokes inside your mouth for a few seconds, says, “Holy cow!” and then runs out of the room for fifteen minutes, the effect on the patient is disquieting.  I suppose it’s not as bad as him screaming, “Fuck!” and then diving out a fifth story window, but not by much.

I managed to avoid the ER yesterday by scheduling an emergency dental appointment with a practitioner in the area.  It’s sort of cool, in a way.  After all, how much emergency dentistry will I have in my life?

I once read somewhere that out of all medical specialties, dentists have the highest rate of suicide.  It is perhaps for this reason—that they spend their spare attention on visions of a clean death administered by their own hands—that they feel the need to make their patients feel like jerks and idiots while we’re in the chair.

I brush thoroughly and floss regularly.  Yet there I was yesterday, bleeding profusely at the slightest touch of his instruments.  My problem, according to the good doctor, is twofold.  The first is that though I floss, I don’t floss deeply enough.  The second is that, being young and stupid, and reasoning that nothing was broken, so why try to fix it, I haven’t been to a dentist in nearly four years.  I’ll spare you the details, but here’s the gist.  The mysterious area beneath my gum line, the place that all the mouthwash commercials warn you about, has become a sort of dental iron mine.  My body’s futile attempts to solve the problem resulted in my bleeding gums and swollen lymph node.

A thorough cleaning, which I have scheduled for next week, along with about a week’s worth of meticulous and highly uncomfortable flossing should get me back to normal.  All things considered, this is really not so bad.  I’ve been through invasive surgery and hours of painful physical therapy.  Having a steel hook scraped along my gums is nothing by comparison.

The diagnosis and the proposed treatment do not bother me in the slightest, in fact, I am greatly relieved.  No, what bothered me was the doctor’s behavior toward me during the examination.  I am, of course, grateful to have been seen with just a few hours’ notice, and I’m sure that the preliminary scraping he gave my mouth is something he’d love to have Total Recalled out of his memory.  Still, his bedside manner was severely lacking (“Holy cow!”).  I left my second-to-last day of work early to come and see this man.  I scheduled an emergency appointment with him.  A word or two of sympathy would have gone a long way toward alleviating my fears over what I felt was an emergency medical situation.  He didn’t even make eye contact with me.  Couldn’t he at least look me in the face as he explained to me what a terrible person I am?  Granted, it’s my own fault for not taking advantage of those two free cleanings per year, but couldn’t he have been a shade kinder about this?

Other thoughts that occurred to me as I sat in the chair:

“Where the hell did he just go?”

“My mouth tastes like pennies.”

“Could you please suction this lake of blood from the back of my throat?”

“Ordinarily I’d be the last person on Earth to ask for this, but could I get a small dose of antibiotics, just in case?  Pretty please?  I promise not to create any drug resistant super-diseases.”

“You really should paint something interesting on the ceiling here.  Maybe a fractal, or that old standby, nudity.”

“Well, I’ll never go more than six months without seeing my dentist ever again.”