33rd Tooth

I have been blessed with a set of teeth that can make any dentist happy. I have undergone all sorts of dental treatments ranging from mundane cavity filling to tooth extractions, root canals, and other sorts of drilling, exploration and excavation activities. I have also been blessed with a medical condition that does not close my teeth completely (Next time you see me gazing at a girl with my mouth wide open, we just blame my teeth ;) !!).  Because of all this, I have spent so much time in my dentist’s chair that sometimes I feel the dentist is actually excavating for dinosaurs remains in my mouth (just in case!).

With so much time in the dentist’s chair, you can only imagine how I spend my time when he is playing with his tools inside my mouth. I imagine my dentist and I being crime fighters driving a high speed car (if you try hard enough, the drilling sound in your mouth at times does seem like the engine of a high revving sports car!). The occasional pain that I then get in my jaw is assumed to be a punch from a bad guy…

If your imagination is not in a position to run that wild, you can always count the number of times he blinks while he is excavating in your mouth. If you are really really bored, then you can count the number of hair in his nostrils. I bet I have observed him more closely than err .. umm .. even his wife! (Come on, she won’t be staring at him at such close quarters for 2-3 hours in a row!!)

The dentist and I share a very complicated relationship. Every time that I go to his clinic he gives me a warm welcome and I can see a twinkle in his eye with $ signs floating in them. Its funny though, that each time I am in excruciating dental pain, he is the first person that I think of (yeah, not God!). And though he has caused me more pain in my life than all my heart breaks, primary school punishments and sports injuries put together, each time that I am in dental pain I go to sit in his chair and go through more pain!

If all this pain was not enough, 2 years ago God decided to gift me with a 33rd tooth. For the technically minded its called – Supernumerary tooth. I actually had this extra tooth protruding out below my front teeth that prevented me from doing some Mandarin pronunciations (yeah for those of you who haven’t heard Chinese – its the most complicated language that I have ever heard and you need to be able to reach all corners of your mouth with your tongue to make all the sounds that they do! And for my Chinese speaking readers – yeah I know I am exaggerating!). This time around when I went to see the doctor, he was happy to see the tooth and promptly had it extracted. So now I am in pain for the last 2 hours and my tongue is heavy because of the anesthesia. I have been speaking like a 2 year old kid with a caffeine overdose so I thought I keep my mouth shut and blabber all that I had to say to you all in this blog post :) !!