Some tortures are physical and some are mental,
But the one that is both is dental.
It is hard to be self possessed
With your jaw digging into your chest,
So hard to retain calm
When your fingernails are making serious alterations in your life line or love line or some other important line in your palm
Those lines by Ogden Nash from the poem titled “this is going to hurt a just a little bit” pretty much summarizes the worst possible nightmare of every person’s life. You don think so? Hey you there…The one with the “oh really! Don’t-be-a- kid attitude”, lets hear what you have to say after you have had a hammer break down your teeth, a bulldozer remove them and a lawnmower clear out the remaining fragments. Well technically I win coz you won’t be able to say anything. I do understand that the tools a dentist uses are much smaller in size (duh!) but that’s exactly the feeling you get in your head when they bring it so close
The irony of the situation is that you go in for an extraction and they tell you “well we will do all that we can but sometimes, jus very rarely your tongue might become numb for the rest of your life or your jaw bone might get fractured…. Jus sign here so that you don’t hold us responsible for it”. So I’m out of a 1000 dollars, they might fracture my bones and they are not responsible for anything that happens after the surgery. Wow and I thought being in the software industry reaped the most profit with least amount of associated risks.
If this is not the most ridiculous…listen to this “Oh dearie! You won’t know anything. You will be sleeping throughout the procedure” and then after about 10 minutes of listening to their sugar coated honey talk and having been reassured a little, they come up with something like this “FYI, there might be some allergic reactions to the general anaesthesia that we administer, such as nausea, vomiting or in very rare cases…. death”. You guessed it! One more document to sign saying they are not responsible for any of above mentioned so-called side effects.
At this point, I almost wanted to say “have you done any surgeries before? Let’s see your doctor’s certificate you quack!”…. I guess my survival instinct just couldn’t lie down quietly
Sometimes I wonder if it is knowledge or ignorance that the human mind needs. 30 years back when my dad got his tooth extracted, he caught a bus went to the dentist place, they gave him a palliative of some kind, pulled out the tooth and then he caught a bus back home. Have we made things easier? Have we reduced the anxiety levels? Have we reduced the pain? Well technological advances may have arrived big time but I still feel the same amount apprehension that Ogden Nash faced four decades ago
The only wisdom that I can impart to you guys right now is that when someone says “don’t worry… this will hurt just a little bit”. That’s your cue to know that its going to hurt hell a lot, you may have to sign death documents where no one is held responsible for dire consequences and its going cost the world
