The Dentist

I’m twenty-six years old now. I am getting my first fillings, my father is fifty-six years old now and has none. I’m usually averse to situations like this - where something is being done to me. I am lying on my back, I have orange glasses on, looking up into spotlight. I think of a poem I studied for my leaving cert - about an insect stuck on a pin in a display cabinet, I don’t remember who it was by or what it was called. I’m not into poems but I felt like that bug. 

A pang seizes me, where I think of all the times I’ve been in a situation like this but unconscious, lying on my front with fingers in my spine, teeth pressed into gums, face pressed into metal in a way I’ll be made aware of when I wake up with blood in my mouth. I try quell this thought, this is not the place to freak out, they’re playing ‘relaxing music’ off an iPad on the counter corner and it’s going to fucking relax me. 

I look up at the dentist, my dentist. I don’t know her name yet, my mouth is wide open now and I try open it wider for her. I’m watching my reflection in her glasses, I wonder if she thinks I’m looking into her eyes. I’m watching my rotten tooth get filed down and my spit get suctioned, they’re too slow on the suction and I gulp the excess, it tastes like iron supplements, or blood, I don’t know.

I think about pain, I think I should learn about pain. Once a psychologist gave me a book titled ‘Pain Survival Guide’ and I wanted to throw it out the third-story window of that hospital designed like a prison. The dentist, my dentist said I shouldn’t feel any pain, I feel smug and think about my high pain tolerance. Then I think, I hate when people say, smugly, that they have a high pain tolerance. I correct myself, in my brain, thinking of pain as perception, as nerves firing, doing their job, protection from injury, depending on how much rest you’ve had or how much you’ve had to eat that day.

Sometimes I talk about pain, not often, sometimes. When I talk about pain, it is usually a pain that is so painful that it is gross and I tell it in a horror-story way, laughing at the extremity, the ridiculousness, then I look up through a laugh and Lile is crying on the couch or Carol-Ann has her hand over her mouth because she is gasping, and that’s when pain becomes true. The dentist, my dentist said I shouldn’t feel any pain.

I wonder if I’m being good for the dentist, I always want to be good. I keep my tongue down and my mouth wide, my jaw starts to cramp, it’s a familiar feeling, I always want to be good. I see the dentist and her assistant speaking their unspoken language, they’re speaking it right now, handing instruments to each other, the assistant preparing the next step before this step is over, I wonder how many times they’ve done this dance. I’m sure the doctors with hands inside me spoke this language too, dancing. I see it done when Jack plays drums with Adam and Fionn, and when Anna plays football with Casey; the dancing, the speaking. 

I ask, in spoken words, what the dentist's name is. I leave the dentist, my dentist, a five-star Google review.