Ignorance Is Bliss

This morning was the morning: the ever-feared, absolutely dreaded, wish-I-could-escape morning: my 8:30am appointment with the dentist.  I fear those appointments.  All because I suffer from severe childhood trauma (at the dentist).  My mom always used to be afraid of the dentist, so I am sure some of that sentiment rubbed off on me.  In retrospect, I totally get why she was terrified of the guy:  I remember my first cavity all too well.  Well, not the cavity, but the experience of having it drilled and filled.  The drilling part is engraved in my memory: no anesthetic (they're not big on that in The Netherlands.  You have to ask for one.  At the dentist and even in the hospital when birthing a baby!!).  Anyways, it hurt like he*l!  And the kicker: he told me "10 more seconds".  Well, I was old enough to count to ten, and guess what...the sadist repeated that 6 times!!  6 x 10 seconds my friends!!  That's a friggin' minute of drilling and laying in that darn chair in excruciating pain.  See where my anxiety comes from? 

Back to the present.  A while back I had a cavity that had comfortably positioned itself between my 2 molars all the way in the back, nicely tucked in between them.  Yeah, nice.  Long story short: it was filled, but it kept bothering me.  So, this morning I was going in to have it all 'fixed'.  The filling was going to be taken out, and replaced.  

Traffic wasn't as bad as I suspected, so I was early.  No chance to quietly read through some of the mind-challenging and brain stimulating gossip magazines in the waiting room as they were ahead of schedule as well.  So before I knew it I was in the chair.

First we had to locate the problem and make sure that it was the previously filled cavity.  "I'm going to put some cold on your tooth.  You tell me when you feel it and when the sensation is gone, okay?"  she said.  She walks off and when she comes back, she's holding a stick that has steam coming off it.  Whaaaaat?!?!  Is that Liquid Nitrogen you're about to touch my teeth with??  I wish I hadn't seen that.  Well, pointing out where the problem was turned out to be an easy exercise.  Holy crap that hurt!!

Then I get my anesthetic.  Despite having had 2 children, birthed them at the hospital, had almost every test done available during my pregnancies, I am still terrified of needles.  The one thing I knew to do this morning was to keep my eyes closed when she pulled out the numbing drug.  They use big ole needles for that.  Can't deal with that early in the morning. Anesthetic starts working, but before I have a chance to tell my dentist to give me double shot (anesthetics never completely work on me in their 'normal' dose), the drill gets whipped out and there we go.  As I said, anesthetic didn't work fully.  Mommy gets second dose.  Within a minute, mommy gets third dose.  At that point, all I want to do is sleep.

A few times I semi-opened my eyes to get an idea of what they were doing, but the tools I saw going into my mouth seriously resembled a nutcracker and some of the tools that David and I have used when we were adding our master suite onto our house.  I don't want to know what went in, what came out, what they did.  I am much happier not knowing.  In this respect, ignorance is DEFINITELY bliss!!  All I knew was that I was numb up to my eye lid and I seriously wondered if I would ever get my straight face back.

Well, here I am.  Early afternoon: my cheek is still a bit numb, but the rest works fine again.  My face is straight again (talking was difficult earlier), but I still feel like a walking zombie.  My cheek is sore as I apparently bit on it a few times in the past few hours.  My tooth still feels sore, which is not surprising when I think back to the tools that it came in contact with and other than that, there's 1 thing I cannot get out of my mind: ice cream.  Ben & Jerry's New York Super Chunk Fudge... Why now?  Why?  Probably not a good idea to dive into that when you just had the nerves in your tooth exposed.  Crap!

I just want to indulge.  I think I deserved that!  Forget about the losing weight thing for a day!  I lost 2 lbs. last week, I am 1 lb. under my pre-pregnancy weight.  I feel like crap, I need comfort food.  As soon as the kids are awake from their nap, we're going on a little afternoon excursion...to the grocery store!!!