A Velvet Lined Sledge Hammer

I have an irrational fear of dentistry.

For years now I have avoided dentists, dentist offices, and all similar forms of archaic torture as if they were each personally responsible for spreading the plague. I am not too sure why this is, though it may lay somewhere in the fact that all previous experiences with these dark practitioneers of having resulted in excruciating amounts of pain and oral torture.

I personally am not afraid of too much. There just are not that many things in this world that honestly frighten, concern, or worry me. Dentistry though - the thought of some angry hairy handed, banana fingered, sour milk smelling mouth breather chipping away at my base skeletal structure - greatly unnerves me.

I guess you could say that if I were to list all the things in this world that I tend to avoid in numerical order dentists would come in around number 17 (it's a big list). Right before Penile Acupuncture and falling just after having my eyelids gnawed off by a rat.

Or at least that is how I felt up until a few days ago.

I woke up not too long ago laden with a sensation not unlike that of 300 pound construction worker handling a jackhammer going to town on my jaw. This dull throbbing (and when I say throbbing I mean tiny atomic explosions of agony) was more than a persistent toothache. At first I thought I had merely done the unthinkable and gone to bed without first brushing and flossing (I didn't say that I avoided toothbrushes). I rolled out of bed and made my way to the mirror, and proceeded to make mistake number two. I opened wide and looked around inside; an inspection that left me thinking I should definately be flossing more regularly. See, I always try to brush my teeth two to three times a day. Once in the morning, once before bed, and often after any meal that I eat while at home. I also try to floss before bed, but sometimes I forget or I am just too tired (and by tired I mean that I have fallen asleep while surfing the 'net and have stumbled off to bed in a cyber-withdrawn semi-coma).

Anyway, this particular day I decided to floss extra good. Perhaps I should have waited. Perhaps I should have put on my glasses. Perhaps, just perhaps, I should re-examine my base, yet entirely subconcious desire, to become immersed in perpetually stronger and more overwhelming sensations of bone jarring physical agony.

While flossing I managed to somehow pop out a filling.

In it's entirety.

A filling that amounted to a good thirty percent of the physical structure of that particular tooth.

As I realized my error; before the full realization of what was to come completely registered, it occurred to me that this pea-sized chunk of blackened silver amalgamate so recently liberated from the confines of my jaw-line currently floating around in my mouth was NOT in fact, a rogue food particle. And then someone snuck up behind me and brought down two-ton wrecking ball on top of my skull. Or at least that is what it felt like.

As the cold morning air, mixed in part with cold tap water intended for rinsing, rushed into my mouth it began to fill the void of my recently departed little silver friend. A void it turns out, that had all along been occupied with a highly agitated live nerve. Boy was this one angry nerve! Let me tell you about nerves and cold -- better yet, let me not. If you want to duplicate the sensation, and this is only applicable if you have fillings yourself, take a golfball sized mass of aluminum foil and chew it. Or lacking fillings, procur a Dremel tool and run the smaller grinding stone attachment across the surface of your molars (turn the Dremel on first - on the "high" setting). Now, take that and multiply it by 7000 times.

Yeah.

It was that painful; and trust me, I am an expert on pain - I almost got married once.

I have been shot, stabbed, beat, and mangled. I have been thrown from a moving vehicle on three separate occasions. I have been struck by moving vehicles on two more occasions (one of those occasions was the same in which I was thrown from one vehicle, but technically there were two seperate impacts and thus, two separate families of wounds). I have broken each of my fingers, two of them twice. I have dislocated one of my thumbs on three seperate occasions. I have broken 5 or 6 ribs in my life and still have tiny bony fragments resting up against my lungs. I have a chronic partial tear in one of rotator cuffs that just won't heal. I have ruptured my calf in three places, dislocated my hip, hyper extended one knee twice, and completely blown out three discs in my back. My nose has had three breaks - all of them complex separations to the inner septum (i.e. they just hurt real bad with minimal disfigurement). The reason I wear glasses is due to severed optic nerves resulting from massive head trauma. It's been a rough life in that regard.

All of that though? Bah! That ain't NOTHING compared to an exposed root in your mouth. I mean, Ho-ly SHIT...this hurt!

As I lay crumpled fetal-like on the cold unforgiving expanse of my privy floor reeling in what was to shortly become one of the worst agonies of my life, one of the teeth on the other side of my mouth must have decided that these things should come in pairs and IT decided to join in!

Now, I am not too sure why this particular tooth decided to join it's corresponding neighbor on the opposite side of my jaw at that particular moment - and don't tell me it was the nerves, they aren't connected, I checked - but for whatever reason my pain instantly doubled.

Moments later (and when I say moments, I mean two or three thousand lifetimes) my Dearly Beloved came in and scraped me off the floor and began to lovingly berate me for not going to the dentist. I listened intently as she told me what I must do; a deceitful plot that involved what I was sure an alien presence implanting pain enabling devices in the very cortex of my head, and promptly ignored her sound, rational, device. Pain, shmain. I didn't care how bad it hurt. There was NO WAY I was going to go to a dentist! Nope. No. Nada. Nyet. Nein. Zip. Zilch. Abso-frickin-lutely....Unh-uh!

Yeah, that lasted about three days.

In the interim I even went so far as to attempt to fix the problem myself. Seriously. I went out and purchased what was for all sakes and purposes a polymer based modelling clay and proceeded to make replacement fillings for the two treacherous teeth in question. I cleaned my mouth real good; hell, I even swished RUBBING ALCOHOL around in my mouth (apparently tooth pain also makes you stupid AND crazy) in order to sterilize the wounds! I wadded up my temporary filling solution and proceeded to fill in the holes; and promptly mashed the exposed nerves quite thoroughly, making them even MORE reactive.

At that very moment the tortured souls of thousand-year-dead evil men look up at me from the fiery depths of hell, felt pity for me, and thanked their infernal masters for taking it easy on them these past ten centuries. The flash of pain was such that I had never experienced in my entire life. I thought for a moment that I had somehow caused my eyes to rupture because the sensation literally caused my vision to go silver and I heard a hi-pitched whine followed by a distinct pop in the back of my head (this pop as it turns out was my foot slamming down in a stomping motion while the whine was in fact my screams of agony).

I finally relented and decided that I would go to a dentist.

It was easter weekend.

Nope.

For three days I spent what seemed like an eternity in a wretched struggle of pain and agony. Then, when I was contemplating the effects of a claw hammer taken to my jaw-line, I got a call from a dentist whom I had left a message for earlier.

They could see me immediately.

Three or four hours later I was hopped up on painkillers and numbing solution. The day after that, I was in a chair getting the first of several root-canals.

Guess what?

My teeth on average have 5 or 6 root canals each.

Yeah.

I am just that damn lucky.

In all fairness, while I still suspect that my end on this mortal world will be propagated by the inequities visited on me through the torturous experiments performed by malignant dentists, the guy that did my root-canal managed to do so without hurting me in the least. Not at all. Not one bit. And when he was done, all my pain went away.

I wept.

Until my courage renews, I remain...

The Son of Simp