Life's A Gas


Quite literally, at my dentist's office. Went in to get a sharp random pain checked-out. Turns out I had a fracture way down in the tooth. Have to get a cap (I'm going for Gold, btw).

I am very clean living now so when I got the laughing gas I sucked that stuff up and tried to breath deeply, like you're supposed to. I was high as a kite in seconds. Then I got the Novocaine, which is such a specific feeling it made me laugh out loud. How do you explain to your dentist that the reason you're laughing is because the injection he just gave you reminds you of a night out in London in 1996? Or that your tongue is so numb it feels like someone else's and you're kind of french-kissing yourself (it was the gas...it made giggly sense at the time)? You don't, not if you want to get any more of the good stuff out of him. I have to compliment his needle skills. I recently went for a blood test at another clinic and the girl taking the samples had all the finesse of a thumbless elephant prodding my arm with a staple-gun, but with my dentist I barely noticed.

But oh, the drill, the smell of burning tooth....the pressure on the nerve as he found the fracture (which felt exactly like the original pain that had sent me in there in the first place). He gave me more novocaine. I was still guzzling the nitrous oxide and smiling, too.
"You like that gas, don't you Richard?" he said.
I giggled. Hell yeah. What's not to like?

When he really got into it, and he and the nurse had their hands in my mouth and were hollowing-out my molar, my entire head felt numb. It was pretty good actually. I was so drugged I was able to let my mind wander in exactly the same manner as it does when I'm drowsy in my bunk on a bus, or when I'm not quite asleep on a plane: I ended up thinking about sex. Quelle surprise.

Then I started to wonder, if going to the dentist and having someone carving up my teeth has me thinking about sex, am I creating a monster? Will I develop a fetish? Could I find myself saying in the small hours, "I'm sorry love, this just isn't working. How about you shine that flashlight into my eyes and dig around on lower-right-seven with a fork?" just to be able to get it on in the future?

I'll be sure to let you know...