The pain began a month or so ago, and grew worse and worse until my Saturday appointment at the expensive dentist’s office, downtown. They’d quoted a price more than quadruple my most recent extraction, circa 1999, but no other dentist would see me for at least a week, and my life wouldn’t last that long without the tooth coming out.
The place was swanky, with fuzzy chairs and a big-screen TV in the waiting room, and a receptionist who walked in from the pages of Playboy. For their prices, I expected swanky, but behind the waiting room it was also weird.
The clinic has six dental chairs, with two dentists on duty servicing the patients in those chairs. What’s weird is, it’s all one long room, with no walls between the chairs. Only filing and storage cabinets separated each chair from all the others.
The cabinets are about seven feet tall, so patients can’t see each other, but you can hear everything from the other chairs. Heck, I’m hard of hearing but every word of three strangers’ dental appointments reached me very clearly.
Mine, of course, was most important to me. It started when a pretty hygienist took 16 different x-rays of my mouth, and then the dentist came in, introducing herself as Dr Dayo, “just like the Banana Boat Song.” She was some kind of ethnic, but wearing a mask and gloves that left her specific heredity as unknown as it was inconsequential. Her English was native, though — she grew up here, which I’m not supposed to say put my mind at ease.
Upon seeing my gawdawful mouth full of fractured, damaged, yellow, and missing teeth, every dentist is required to offer a sales pitch for full dental reconstruction, but Doc Dayo’s pitch was the quickest yet. “We can fix your whole mouth if you want, but I’m guessing you’d say no.”
“You guessed right. My mouth is a lost cause, and I don’t have the money to make it Cary Grant’s mouth.”
“You’ll never get Kathryn Hepburn with that attitude, young man,” she said, but that ended the sales pitch, and I liked her. She said the x-rays showed “a thriving infection,” and that four teeth needed to either be saved (for several thousand dollars), or pulled (for several hundred, per tooth). I’d come expecting just one tooth to be yanked, and said so, “and that’s this tooth on the bottom” — I tapped it.
“That’s #30 and it’s a problem, and may be where you’re feeling most of the pain, but it’s secondary. The urgent problem is this tooth, #23,” and she used a long metal stick to tap one of the lower front tiny teeth. It’s a tooth that hadn’t been hurting, but had become numb like all its neighbors over the past weeks. My lower gums are swollen with infection, leaving all my lower central teeth feeling tightly jammed against each other, and numb even without novocaine.
“#23 is the source of the infection, and it needs work or an extraction or the infection will keep spreading. This other tooth, #30, the one you’re asking me to pull? It’s fooling you. It’s infected too, but with antibiotics it’ll survive and keep chewing. I recommend extracting #23, as well as #24, #25, and #26 because they’re all infected, and must be either repaired or removed.”
Paying this clinic’s price for one tooth-pulling had seemed a necessary albeit colossal expense, so I’d come to the pricey place because it’s an emergency. But paying their prices to have four teeth pulled would’ve left me homeless. Balancing the dentist’s expertise against my budget, I asked her to pull #23, but leave #24, #25, #26, and #30.
The receptionist took my debit card to get pre-payment for the yanking, and while she rang me up I listened to the patient in the chair adjacent to mine, behind one of the cabinets. He was visiting from Scotland, suffering a toothache, and Doc Dayo recommended a filling and possibly a crown, which she said would cost three grand. Instead he asked for a prescription for the pain, and said he’d wait until he’d returned to Scotland, where dental care is covered by the National Health Service. What a concept!
Pretty soon, Doc Dayo came back to me, and injected novocaine into my face. That’s when the pain started — almost unendurable pain. It was much, much worse than all the pain the toothache had brought.
It’s been 25 years since I’ve seen a dentist, but novocaine injections for dental work have always been a mild sting as the needle goes in, followed by beloved numbness. This time, the injection was flabbergastingly painful, oh-my-god it hurt so much I began shivering in my legs and torso, shouting obscenities like a sailor’s daughter. As the needle went farther in and the pain became unfathomable, I reflexively raised by arm and fist in self-defense, nearly punching the dentist.
“Please don’t do that,” she said, and explained that some people find it painful when the novocaine is injected directly into an infection.
“OH MY FUCKING CHRIST I AM SOME PEOPLE, AND THAT WAS PAINFUL!” I said, briefly embarrassed because everyone in the open-office was listening, but screw the embarrassment, so I screamed a little louder and with more colorful obscenities. Doc waited for me to relax, which barely happened, and then explained, “The area is already inflamed and under great pressure, so the injection is extra unpleasant, and the infection’s acidic environment tends to nullify the anesthetic.”
“Oooh, nothin’ could be finer than pulling a tooth with nullified anesthetic.”
She nodded sympathetically and injected again, going very slowly and gently. Again I screamed, and this time I physically struck her in the arm or shoulder — a nudge, not a punch, but still inappropriate. Of course I apologized, and also of course she warned that if there was a third swing of the fist she’d have to end the appointment.
I asked if they had handcuffs I could wear, but she suggested sliding my hands under my butt on the fully reclined dental chair. After that, moving my arms would’ve required swiveling my hips, an extra second or two for the doc to get out of the way.
It took several jabs to get the novocaine into my jaw, and each of those jabs is among the top ten most physically painful moments of my life. At least the pain faded quickly, when she pulled the needle out.
After each injection, Dr Dayo slipped away and worked with other patients, but she came back in 15 minutes to ask about the pain. The entire region felt numb, but there was still pain at the target tooth, #23. On a scale of 1-10, with 10 being unbearable, #23 was 8-level pain a quarter-hour after the first injection, 6 after a second injection, and 4 after a third injection. Doc said “We’ll get it to zero,” and gave yet another injection of novocaine, and again HOLY POPE’S ANUS the injection was painful, but soon the pain faded.
During one of the doctor’s away times, I listened to an unnaturally cheerful woman who wasn’t in the next ‘room’, but two or maybe three ‘rooms’ away. She said she was on vacation from Chicago, and didn’t want her toothache to ruin her time in Seattle, so, “Sure, do whatever you need to do. We have good insurance.” I didn’t overhear the dollars and cents, but I’m sure they soaked her like someone walking into a car dealership who says, “Money is no object!”
When the dentist came back, my pain in tooth #23 was down to about 2, but the circle of numbness all around it was closing in, because it had been an hour since the first shot. “The novocaine is starting to wear off,” Doc said, “and I’ve given you all I can legally give, so it’s now or never.”
Never sucks, so I went with now. Compared to the pain of the injections, pulling the tooth was like scratching an itch. It took about 45 seconds, and I barely felt it.
After the extraction, the dentist and her assistant left me alone for a few minutes, while Doc Dayo tended to a little kid in the next chair, behind the cabinets. The kid sounded like Melissa Gilbert in Little House on the Prairie, and her drilling started without any complaint. I eavesdropped and shivered and wished I’d had that child’s courage.
I left with two prescriptions, but hurting more than when I’d walked in. Still shaking and shivering, I precariously made my way several blocks to the same Walgreens where I’d once worked, but that was more than a year ago, so nobody recognized me. Which is good. I wasn’t feeling chatty.
I waited in line to have two prescriptions filled with the company’s famously callous customer service, plus extra stink-eye, extra questions, and what seemed an extra wait, presumably because my shakes and shivers made me look like an addict. More suspicions were raised when the clerk asked my address, and I recited where I’d lived in Wisconsin until 2022.
You’d think a pharmacy would have a drinking fountain for folks swallowing pills, but of course not — there’s money to be made selling bottled water. I bought the water, and took the first dose of my pills — an antibiotic for the infection, and Tylenol3 for the pain. This had me feeling a full 5% better 40 minutes later, when my bus came.
I was home by 1PM, and immediately fell asleep. Two days have passed, the antibiotics have begun reducing the jaw and face swelling, and my mouth pain is so low I’ve taken only one of the Tylenol3s. I’m still cold and shivering, though, and since Saturday, six hours haven’t passed without me falling asleep. I’m never very awake. Presumably it’s the antibiotics that are making me groggy.
But I’m a happy, groggy guy. Tooth #23 is gone, and with it went almost all the pain. Tooth #30, where I’d thought the pain was headquartered for a month, feels fine. My appointment with a much more affordable dentist is a week from tomorrow, and with luck it’ll be goodbye to #24, #25, and #26. Here’s hoping it goes so smooth and boring, I won’t even want to write about it.
And then I’d like to spend whatever life is left for me brushing twice daily, but other than that never thinking about my teeth at all.
8/4/2025
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