Dentists – Masters of Understatement

I clung to the ceiling of the dentist’s office, fingers and toes dug into the soft panels. I felt like a gecko. Below my rigid form, the dentist and his assistant both looked up at me with deep concern in their eyes, steel tools glinting in the bright fluorescent light.

“Sorry. Is that area a little sensitive?” Understatement is something that dentists learn in school early on. In fact, if they are incapable of mastering those subtle nuances of speech, they often are washed out of dental school and go on to become politicians.

For example, a skilled dentist will be able to hold a gleaming, 14-inch, cast iron needle attached by five different tubes to a gallon jug of some mysterious, dentist-type liquid concoction, and as he uses both hands to move the 22-pound instrument toward your gaping mouth, he will casually mention that “this might sting a little”.

Another area of understatement where they excel deals with inserting the entire contents of a 24-foot U-haul into your mouth, including the truck itself. That exchange typically goes something like this:

“Okay, we’re just going to insert this bite block, these four clamps, these other four clamps, then these other four clamps. Now this entire box of cotton, two X-ray machines, a string of fluorescent lights, a 14-gallon wet/dry shop vac with attachments, and these three magazines that you left in the waiting room with the articles you didn’t get to finish. Great. Now one more box of cotton, two t-shirts, a tennis shoe, a lug wrench, three dictionaries, your elbow, and a couch cushion. You’re doing great. And finally, your other elbow, these twelve balloons that we’ve inflated and tied up to look like little doggies, and this bowling ball that we use to keep your tongue in place. Perfect.

“Now—is that comfortable?” Then, after firing up that $46,000 multi-arm overhead light fixture – the one that is capable of casting hand-puppet shadows on the dark side of the moon, and that exists nowhere else on earth except in a dentist’s office – he stares into your mouth for 15 minutes. He taps here, probes there, and tsk-tsks over your addiction to Tootsie-Rolls and LifeSavers and the fact that you only floss on alternate Thursdays during full moon cycles. Then comes that string of incomprehensible dentistry-type instructions that he rattles off to his assistant as if you’re not there.

“This is an absolute mess. There is massive bone loss, his gums have receded all the way to his ankles, and there’s an odor that has to be coming from the gates of Hell itself. He’ll be lucky if he’s not dead in a week.

“We’ll need to do an immediate lateral internal bicuspial infarction on Number 22; a lingual amalgam infusion along the cusp of the internacial on Number 18; a complete scraping of the lower 22 centimeters of the lingual interstate to remove the asphalt-infested intra-distaline incrustation on Numbers 3, 9, 10, and 14; a subcutaneous algorithm of the root base stem both bilaterally and semi-sectionally at the interconnection with the left sinus intercranial crossover on Number 7; and then a complete testing of the subterranean root ball nerve-ends on the upper and lower mandible interfaces to make sure his toes still curl when we activate all of the pain sensor receptacles. Cancel all my patients for the next three weeks, call my wife and let her know I won’t be home for at least a month, schedule two anesthesiologists on rotating 12-hour shifts, and make sure I have at least 16 assistants on standby. This is going to be a really nasty one.”

Then, with a benign smile and a fatherly tap on the shoulder, he says “just a little minor work—nothing at all to worry about”.

Somebody point me to the nitrous oxide.