Thursday, June 08, 2006

Smile! You have artificially enhanced teeth!

Having not gone to the dentist for several (by several, I mean the very similar sounding but much more disgusting "seven") years, I am finally reaping what I had sown in my less prudent years (curse you, four-bottle-a-day non-diet soda habit! Curse you, Yan Yan! No, I cannot, I love you too much), starting with a marathon four-cavity-filling session on Tuesday afternoon.

For those of you who do visit your dentist regularly, you are probably unaware of the feverish terror that grips your heart when he (because are there female dentists? I don't know that I've ever seen one. They must be like Yeti. Or better yet, they must actually BE Yeti) fires up that drill, or even before that, when he comes at you with That Needle, that just has Novacaine in it, but might as well be filled with cyanide. But as usual, this trip to the dentist really wasn't that bad, although he did leave far too much filling gunk on the backs of my front teeth, making me constantly feel like they are coated in some sort of cement jacket.

The weirdest thing happened while I was there, though-- after he finished my cavities, the dentist (whose name I don't even know; I go to Aspen Dental, which is sort of like the hair salon of dentists, where they just give you whoever's available) said "Do you mind if I do a little cosmetic dentistry on you?"

This was intriguing; I had a cotton wad shoved under my upper lip to staunch some "unforseen bleeding," and was furiously twisting my copy of "OK!" magazine, and suddenly, he had the urge to just do some cosmetic dentistry.

"Because see? Your canines are real pointy," he went on, tapping on my thoroughly numbed but admittedly very pointy canine teeth. "And I see that your front tooth is broken-- I can smooth that all out for you."

"Ow Uch?" I asked.

"$150 a tooth," he admitted. "But I just feel like doing it."

And so, because the dentist just felt like performing minor surgery, I now have a super awesome smile and totally unpointy canine teeth, which is something that, along with that broken front tooth, had always kind of bothered me (something I never realized until the second he offered to fix them. For free. For no reason). Seriously, I feel like a fashion model now. Except for the rock hard crap on the backs of my front teeth. Which I can really kind of ignore, considering how sassy my new smile is.

4 pipers piping:

Anonymous said...

I want to SEE the new smile.

And as to the female dentist thing, there is one I know of Wilmington. Apparently her greatness is such that she's the one person that very nearly turned our graphic designer un-gay. Now those are some dental skills.

Kurt said...

I have a female dentist and she smoothed my front tooth for free.

mendacious said...

i'm intrigued.

daisy said...

Two part story.

1. It has always made me very sad that I naturally do NOT have pointy canine teeth. I love canine teeth. I seriously fret about this several times a year. I am sure your new smile is beautiful, but one should not feel that canine teeth are a bad thing.

2. The last time my brother went to the dentist for a teeth cleaning, he had to go back in again a week later because they didn't have enough time to do it all at once.

I am - annoyingly - a 2x a year dentist visiter. But my last dentist gave you headphones and let you watch DVDs. It didn't occur to me that Sex & the City was an innapproriate choice until Samantha was riding a guy naked. Oh well.