Lousy Dentists

I do not like dentists. I used to despise going to them because it hurt to get my teeth cleaned. I didn’t like to floss. The hygienist raked that floss between my teeth like she was sawing through a redwood, and I’d be sore and bleeding for days. I also didn’t appreciate the lectures I got about flossing. They were always so hateful about it.

“You haven’t flossed, have you?”

“Yes, I flossed just before I came here.”

“And when was the time before that?”

“Uh, I think you did it that time.”

“Why don’t you take better care of your teeth?”

I felt like a miscreant.

Now I floss all the time. I discovered these little packages of sticks with floss on them that I use constantly in my car. I’m driving down the road, flossing away. It’s a great invention.

These days my loathing of dentists comes from their apparent incompetence. I say apparent to be nice, because the last couple of ones I’ve had have been awful. One ended up doing a crown on a tooth that I thought he was only going to cosmetically improve. I didn’t realize I was getting a crown until was done and got infected and he wrote me a referral to see someone to have a root canal. Fortunately I didn’t go to the appointment and instead found another dentist who gave me penicillin that cleared it up.

Unfortunately, she decided I needed a bite adjustment and ground down my back teeth to the point that my front ones banged together the whole time I was talking, which led to agony and finally getting braces to bring the back teeth up. Two years of that and my teeth are working again. My orthodontist did a good job, but he’s not a dentist.

When he took the braces off the crown, part of the fake tooth came away, so metal is showing. I went to my regular dentist (the one I started going to after the bad dentist ruined my bite), and he told me he didn’t want to bond over the missing part that tooth needed a crown and I should just have it done at one time.

“But it’s already a crown.”

“No, that’s your regular tooth.”

“Then why is there metal there?”

“I’m not sure that’s metal.”

“It is metal.”

“It can’t be metal, because it’s not a crown.”

“But the dentist who put it on said it was a crown and it got infected and he said I needed a root canal.”

“I don’t know why he’d call it a crown. It’s not a crown.”

It’s hard to argue with logic like that.

I’m not sure how these people got through dental school, but I’ve sure had a lousy string of dentists in the last few years, and it’s leaving a very, very bad taste in my mouth.