Dentists: When You Hate Them but Need Them
What else can you do when you need a tooth fixed?
Tomorrow, I have to visit my dentist. I hate the dentist — not the person, but the place. Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve disliked going to the dentist — for any reason.
When we were little, our dentist was mean. He never smiled. He yelled at my sister and me about our oral hygiene and scolded us for brushing wrong. We both had a lot of cavities. We did brush — twice a day. But we still seemed to get cavities. Back in the 1960s cavities were filled with metal amalgam. Yes, I have silver-colored fillings. And I used to receive nitrous oxide (gas) from the Dentist — Dr. Sloan to work on me.
The school nurse would visit classrooms and talk about brushing and then you’d eat a colored tablet that would stain your teeth if they weren’t clean. I mean whose teeth were clean in school? Probably not many children, at least not those I knew.
Anyway, as I reached adulthood and could choose my dentist, I had one I liked — a woman. Then, we moved. I had another dentist when we moved to Wisconsin that I didn’t like — he was preoccupied with insurance and making sure I spent everything allotted to me by my (my husband’s plan). Ah, no. We don’t work like that. He also wanted to replace all of my amalgam fillings with…
