Being brazen at The Dentist

I went to The Dentist last week. I haven't been for an 'annual check-up' in, well, about five years. I do not like The Dentist. I was the nerdy girl at school with railway tracks, adorned with coloured elastic bands, which necessitated painful monthly visits to the orthodontist. They did, however, allow a morning off school a month, and a chance to wander around the campus town where my boarding school resided. Each time the housemistress questioned why we couldn't get afternoon appointments, we shrugged our shoulders teenager-edly and skipped away. I digress. Point is, I feel like I had my fill of dental appointments in my teenage years and, therefore, avoid them now.

So I went, with long teeth (snigger). And I sat nervously in the waiting room, with it's specific antiseptic/dentist smell and the sound of high-pitched drills and screaming (yes, I'm prone to over-exaggeration) coming from down the long passage to hell, I mean the consulting room. The twenty minutes I waited (why can they never be on time), felt like three days, as nervous anticipation gripped my stomach, causing me to feel ill and making me think I should leave, quickly, while still alive. Beads of sweat dripped from my forehead, landing on the sterile, tiled floor, while an exceedingly irritating screen showed the same six trivia questions in repeat, next to a 50-times life-size poster of a dental implant (WTF?). I'm not good with nervous anticipation. And I knew he would ask me about flossing.

And then the pretty (why are they always petite) dental assistant came clip-clopping through on her high heels, bright white smile lighting up her face as she cruelly called my name and I followed her to the chair of torture, behind which a rather nice-looking young dentist was standing in his turquoise dentist suit, face mask casually wrapped around his neck. His nice-lookingness didn't fool me though, I saw the evil dentist glint in his eye. The left one.

"Lie back and relax, " he said, pulling his mask over his mouth and wielding that extremely sharp scrapy thing which he'd surreptitiously extracted out of the box of torture next to him. "Open up." I did. I'm obedient. But my heart beat so loudly it (fortunately) drowned out the next door drilling sounds. He did the usual dentist thing and asked me all sorts of questions while digging around in my wide-open mouth, me splutteringly mumbling answers through his hands/instrument of torture.

Each time he opened his mouth to speak, I anticipated his next words to be: "Oh dear, I'm sorry, we'll have to pull these two out, and do root canal on the five over there." They didn't come, though. He kept making rather pleasant 'mmm' sounds. I was pretty sure he was lulling me into a false sense of calm. Cruel man.

"That all looks fine. Let's just do some X-rays to check." I couldn't believe my ears. All fine? Hmm, yes, X-rays... here it comes... pictures of the enormous cavities hiding in my teeth, filled with vicious germs, like in the toothpaste ads. Then he pulled this tiny little plastic thing out, which he put in my mouth in various positions, taking X-rays which showed my teeth, immediately, on the screen next to us. It was amazing. Like I said, it's been a while since I was in a dentist's chair so I was awe-struck by this new technology.

"All good. Your teeth are perfect." I almost fell out of the uppy-downy-lie-back-if-you-wanna-dentist chair. Relief flooded through me, causing me (almost) to kiss the dear man's cheeks.

"Do you floss?" he asked.

I was brazen. "No." He looked at me in horror. "I have perfect teeth, you just told me. Sans floss." The man could not reply. I smiled broadly, thanked him for his time and rushed away, safe in the knowledge that I can probably put the next visit to the Torture Chamber off for another, well, five years or so.

There's nothing better than being able to be brazen with The Dentist, is there?