Ouch

Yesterday I had a dentist appointment. You all know: it can never be pleasant. It just can’t. The skill level of the doctor factors in only slightly. There are few things in the natural world more humiliating that having your mouth propped open by a rubber and steel instrument while you are being asked questions you can only answer by a particularly meaningful squint of the eye. Few things outside of intentional torture, that is.
My dentist is excellent. He is professional, efficient, and funny. But somehow all that matters very little when you cannot feel the right side of your mouth and are watching globules of spit fly up out of your mouth and onto the dark glasses they have provided. You feel a drop land on your nose, but no one is wiping it off for you. Why isn’t the hygienist wiping it off for you? You obsess about that drop of spit on your nose, imagine what your face looks like, stretched wide open and covered with blue rubber, that shiny bit of spit across your nose.
You have never looked more ridiculous. They must be laughing at how you look. The hygienists must talk about it in the lounge at lunch.
You know it is only making the situation worse, focusing on that spit and so you try to let it go, try to concentrate on your breathing, but then the whine of the drill, high pitched and chilling. You wonder if the Novocain is going to work, maybe it isn’t strong enough, maybe he missed and that drill is going to be more painful than anything you have ever experienced. Your hands clench tight around the copy of Newsweek on your lap, open to a story you will never finish reading about a man executed in Texas. Did he feel like this, strapped to the table, awaiting the lethal injection?
Oh for god’s sake breathe, you cannot feel the drill. But the spit is still there, on your nose, though it is dry now. You wiggle your nose, lift a fist to your face, but the dentist tells you to lie still, almost there. The hygienist laughs and says you have the loudest spit she’s ever heard. What does that mean? Doesn’t everyone’s spit sound like that when they suck it up the tube? Now you can only hear the spit, nothing else. The sound of the spit drowns out the drill, the chit chat they are making so close to your face, the two of them prodding and poking, laughing. You have the loudest spit. Stop it spit, stop it. Stop making that noise. You try to shift the tube with your tongue, but it only makes the noise louder and it seems to echo in the tiny room.
There is nothing that can be done about this; nothing but to accept that you have loud spit, accept that you are ridiculous and numb, drooling and distorted. Your muscles relax and you sit defeated in the chair.
“Okay,” the dentist says. “You’re all set.”
“Thanks,” you mumble, and wipe your nose.