Mary + Her Mental Health

Today started out just about as lovely as a day in early April could. Birds, sunshine, mild breeze, buds starting to appear on trees, a pegasus flying across the puffy popcorn clouds and blue sky...okay maybe not the pegasus thing.

Then you go to this silly place called a dentist because you've had a minor pain in one of your tooths for about, oh, three months. You figured you'd just keep flossing and everything would be okay. Then you start to wonder about it possibly being a broken filling. You dismiss from your mind the two most dreaded words in the world of dentistry almost as quickly as you thought them. And you go to the dentist.

Then you sit in the chair, put your pretty bib on, and wait. You notice the floor needs a good mop and question the cleanliness of the man's teeth tools. Dirty floor=Dirty Drill? Possibly. You choose to not think on it. You choose not to think about a lot of stuff when you're sitting there.

Your dentist barely pokes at anything before he announces that you do not have a broken filling, that indeed you have a broken TOOTH. Indeed. His hands are still in your mouth so the only socially appropriate way to respond to this news is to widen your eyes to the size of hub caps. You resist the urge to throw his hands out of your mouth and exclaim, "Shut UP!"

Then the dentist explains that the likely reason for a broken tooth at your age is, and I quote, "a monstrous cavity." Oh bliss. Dentist goes away, and dental assistant comes in to take a couple pictures of your tooth. He lays that heavy x-ray blanket thing on you, and STILL your mind refuses to rest on the dreaded two words.

Dental assistant goes away and you wait. You listen to John Mellencamp sing about how he can breathe in a small town, but wonder if that's really true since the man smokes about 15 packs a day and probably hasn't been able to take a deep breath since he was 7.

Dentist comes back with "bad news". Your countenance changes to helpless victim in one last effort to prevent the reality from happening. Feebly you utter the words, "does this bad news involve two words?" He nods in the affirmative. You smile out of pure denial.

In your particular case, however, two words doesn't quite cut it. Dentist Man throws in a third word: "Emergency". Ah. Good. A word that always puts one immediately at ease. As if the two words, without the qualifying "Emergency", weren't enough to open the anxiety floodgates. Dentist asks if you've been in pain. Well, yeah sure you have. Dentist asks why you haven't come in sooner. Carefully you explain in as polictically correct a way as you can that you simply don't like his kind. You think all his kin need to be rounded up and shot. He takes the criticism well...for a dirty, good for nothing Dentist Man.

Okay, so now you've got THREE words vamping over and over in your brain as Dentist says something about calling this specialist, this Extra Dirty Devil Dentist Person, who is "really nice", that can perform the now three-worded deed for you. Dentist recommends this be done this week. Oh please. What is this...advanced cancer? No. It's a tooth. But then Dentist speaks to you with added concern as he issues another fun phrase: "pain you have not yet experienced in this lifetime."

And an hour later from now, you walk back out into the gorgeous New England afternoon to enjoy the rest of your half sick day. Perhaps you'll go to a movie, or go home and straighten up your room, or hop onto your laptop so you can post a long overdue report on your life and how you've added a FOURTH word to the official definition of the worst news a dentist can give you: "STINKIN' EMERGENCY ROOT CANAL." And the party in your mouth starts THIS WEDNESDAY AT 3:00 P.M.

Now did you really deserve to hear that? No. No you didn't.