Reviewing Dentist Stories
Recently I began a bit of housekeeping on the blog; checking if anything should be deleted, trying to remember what stories had already been chronicled, that sort of thing. Oddly enough, the first point that jumped out at me had to do with dentistry. For a while there I was writing quite a bit about dentistry. Well, perhaps not so much about the profession of dentistry as about the individual who was then my dentist.
I wasn’t actually present when he was thrown out of the jazz club on Sunset Boulevard. And if I remember correctly, he managed to get someone fired, not so much over his extrovert behavior, but over his prodigious consumption of very pricey liquor before revealing that he had apparently mislaid his wallet.
On my first day as a patient he grabbed one of those elastic tube things that dentists somehow use for something, and tied off my right arm, and began to explain the method by which someone – presumably when he was a dental student – would tie off an arm to inject heroin.
On my second visit, whilst injecting me with Novocain, he sent his assistant out of the room so that he could ask me a personal question. Much to my surprise this had nothing to do with my treatment. Instead he wanted to let me know that he’d been having sex dreams about his very attractive receptionist. What concerned him was that lately these dreams tended to involve both his willowy receptionist and her tremendously fit Australian husband. He wanted to know if I thought that there was anything odd about that. In case the reader may be wondering, when a highly trained professional is leaning over you, one hand in your mouth, and brandishing a seemingly huge syringe, it is very difficult not to tell him that “Everything seems completely normal” to you.
My new dentist, is far more geographically convenient, more stable, doesn’t keep suggesting major dental surgery (possibly to offset gambling debts?), and is far less entertaining in the office. All he wants to do is talk about cars in general, and specifically the old Porsche that he’s restoring. On the other hand, his office manager has children at my old High School, and she agrees with me that the, now retired, principal was a major loon.
I suppose that life is a series of trade offs.