Scenes from a Torture Rack

(Rejected Title:Blood,Pain and Random thoughts on a dentist's chair)

Pain is good.It reassures you that you are alive.

I'm not afraid of pain.I've inherited the thick-buffalo-skinned high pain threshold gene from my dad's side.Me and my dad are often unfazed after a session of bumping and banging into things.As a kid, I used to poke needles into my skin just to show off!

Whirrrr!    The dental drill drones menacingly.

The masked dentist stops and tells" I'll have to go deeper into your gums.This might pain a little.Do you want an anaesthetic?"

"Not necessary Doc! " I reply

But you could've told this to me earlier when you were actually drilling into my tender and sensitive gums!

"Nope! I can bear it"

Whirrrrrr!    He continues.

This is the final stage of my dental restoration saga.Going against my friend's advice, I chose to have a Dental Bridge instead of a Dental Implant.Reason? Time Constraints.I simply could not wait for another two months.

Also, another friend had told me that the upper jaw has more porous bone structure than the lower jaw making it an un-viable and unreliable site for an implant.

Whirrrrrr! The drill drones.

My dentist is supposed to reduce my teeth by a millimeter...Now that doesn't seem like much, but believe me, the end result was that my pearly whites were reduced to mere stubs!

What you don't know cannot hurt you.

While sitting on the chair, I just realized that I had disproved the above saying.

While the dentist was cutting into my gums without informing me, it hurt a lot.

He then asked me to choose between numbness and pain, between feeling and un-feeling.The choice was obvious.Numbness would lose again.I'd always choose to feel.

But the pain was not as intense when I knew it would hurt.My mouth was open and a steady stream of blood,saliva & water dribbled on the apron, and all I could think was that the anticipation of pain had somehow numbed it down.

In life, it was only the pain that came out of nowhere and blindsided you that hurt you the most.For everything else,the coping mechanisms inside your head had ways of making you 'Comfortably Numb"

(The included picture is for humorous purposes only and does not intend to undermine my dentist's expertise or professionalism.BTW, my dentist's drill is much smaller, but equally effective in inflicting pain! Ha ha)