why i hate my dentist

This will come as no surprise: I hate going to the dentist. As an adult, all of the dentists I've gone to have been women. My childhood dentist was a man and I loved him. His hands always smelled like soap (this was before the AIDS crisis, needless to say) and no matter how many cavities I'd managed to wrack up since the last visit, he was happy to fill them! Did I mention he had 6 children, all planning to attend college?

I found a really wonderful dentist in Seattle who was very no-nonsense. She helped me through my "my teeth are all going to fall out!" phase and then passed me on to another really terrific dentist who let patients watch movies while the hygientist worked. Needless to say, Dr. Doolittle can go a long way toward calming terrified patients like me, normally tensed so much that I have to stretch before I drive home.

My dentist here is a mercury-free dentist, the only reason I picked her. My first visit lasted about 3 hours, 45 minutes of that was spent sitting alone in a room, wondering if they had completely forgotten about me. I was planning not to go back, but I'd paid a lot to get a bunch of xrays taken and I really do want to get my cruddy mercury fillings replaced, so yesterday I went back. Almost immediately I wished I hadn't. I got into a fight with my dentist. She is so sweet, so caring, so motherly that I want to smother her with my chest spit protector thingy and run gleefully from the office. I bite back my anger and stick to my guns. She goes away and the hygientist begins to work. That is, she begins after she finds her chain thingy that holds on the spit thingy, and then again after she trades the wrong tools for the right ones.

The cleaning itself sped past. I guess that tartar toothpaste really does work! Then the dentist came back to figure out what the hell to start working on. I beg her to fix the tooth that has an old filling and (according to her) 3 cracks. It hurts! No, don't do 4 tests to figure out what makes it hurt (cold, hot, sweet, sour, salty, bitter, watching too much According to Jim), just fix the damned thing.

Slightly more than an hour after I got there, I am free, but I have to go back. Oh darn, I am busy for a while and can't make a long appointment anytime this century. Besides, she wants to work early in the morning and then after that I have to come back and either teach or work at the reference desk? Already I have visions of me, inadventently imitating Bill Cosby "take-bah the first-bah left-bah...", drooling and cursing. Of course, that'd come out something like "Ah hate-bah mah exshpletive denshist."