Sketches from the Rain II
I spent the next week in agony. My tooth let off a dull, throbbing pain for most of the day. Not bad, but unpleasant. The problem was when I ate, a stray particle of food could cause searing and remorseless pain. I think the pain itself didn’t bother me as much as the idea that it hurt to eat. That negative stimulus could be attached to food — I felt like one of Pavlov’s dogs.
On St. Patrick’s Day I got up early and headed to the dentist’s office. It was packed. The root canal specialist flew to the office from San Diego, and they tried to squeeze as many root canals as they could into his day. Because of this, during the surgery I would often be left by the doctor for several hours, and I spent eight hours in the dentist’s chair that day.
Luckily I came armed with a copy of the Great Gatsby, so I was prepared for some long sits. That’s what I was reading when the specialist first approached me that day.
“Ah. You are using time efficiently,” I heard in a gruff voice behind me. I glanced over my shoulder; the dentists I’d met so far in that building were Asian and not very chatty. This guy was pretty old, with a wild white beard and stark white hair that grew over his ears and collar. He wore thick rimmed glasses and a white coat that gave him a kind of mad scientist appearance. And a thick accent that I guessed to be Eastern European.
He treated me with Novocaine and left to stop by a few other patients. The rooms in that office weren’t rooms at all, but merely sections of a large hallway. I could see two or three patients from my seat, and I believe that they as well as others there that day were all getting root canals. I kept my nose in Gatsby.
The old doctor came back and asked me if I was numb.
“Shlure am!” I told him.
“Good.” He sat down and started strapping me in for the long haul. He was chatting with me while he wired my mouth open, and all I was left to respond was grunts and gestures. It must be lonely at times to be a dentist.
His accent was thick and took me time to get used to. His ideas and expressions were odd as well, so I was surprised by what I was hearing him say and attributing it to misunderstanding.
“You see you never know what may happen, young man. I am old man, who would think I could meet women? But now I find myself sitting across from pretty young lady.” He motioned to the nurse sitting across from him (over me), a pretty Chinese lady. She giggled.
“Oh doctor, your wife!”
“Yes, yes my wife. I love my wife very much.”
“She is in San Diego, doctor?”
“Yes. No time to see each other, I am always flying. Always flying. You see?” He looked at me, “you see how many patients here? This is slow day.”
I laughed, and the nurse tapped me and shook her finger in a scolding manner.
The doctor proceeded with the drilling and the noise drowned out conversation for a while.
After a while I was finished with the drilling part of the ordeal, and about to find out that was the easy part. After he finished the doctor removed the metal clamps holding my mouth open and indicated to the nurse that I needed an X-ray. He left, presumably to work on other patients, and I was led to the X-ray machine. The rubber fixture clamped to my tooth still dangled out half my mouth. I held the film in my mouth just like she told me to, but the picture apparently didn’t come out right. She had to keep taking it again and again.
Meanwhile, the flimsy napkin affixed around my neck was soaked through with saliva.
She finally noticed once when she came back. “Oooh… are you drooling?” she cooed at me.
“Yeesssh!” I slurped back.
She pulled out her sucking tool and sucked some of the drool out of my mouth. I felt momentarily better. Eventually, she got the right pictures and I was led back to the original dentist’s chair.
I immediately went back to reading the Great Gatsby:
Reading over what I have written so far, I see I have given the impression that the events of three nights several weeks apart were all that absorbed me. On the contrary, they were merely casual events in a crowded summer, and, until much later, they absorbed me infinitely less than my personal affairs.
Most of the time I worked. In the early morning the sun threw my shadow westward as I hurried down the white chasms of lower New York to the Probity Trust. I knew the other clerks and young bond-salesmen by their first names, and lunched with them in dark, crowded restaurants on little pig sausages and mashed potatoes and coffee. I even I even had a short affair with a girl who lived in Jersey City and worked in the accounting department, but her brother began throwing mean looks in my direction, so so when she went on her vacation in July I let it blow quietly away.
I realized after a while that the doctor had been gone nearly two hours. I also realized that my mouth wasn’t so numb anymore, and I felt a dull, throbbing from the right side of my face.
Not long after that the doctor returned. The nurses had apparently changed shifts, and the Asian woman from earlier had gone on a lunch break.
“I never get to take break,” the Doctor complained. The new nurse was older than the last one and spoke with a similar accent to the Doctor.
“Some lunch would you like? We could have someone bring…”
“No, no. Don’t trouble.” the Doctor muttered. It seemed he cared less about eating lunch and more about having something to complain about.
He sat down next to me, prepared to work more on my teeth it seemed.
“Hey is this gonna hurt more?” I slurped through my mouth stuffed with rubber and metal, “I think the anesthetic wore off.”
“No. No pain.” And he wired my mouth open.
Before long it became clear that he was actually conducting the most painful process of the entire procedure, and stuffing metal pins into the roots of my teeth. When the first one slid in I let out a loud and earnest yell.
“What do you know of pain?” The doctor demanded of me. “Your country invades Iraq. When you go there you tell me about pain.”
He continued and jammed another pin into my tooth.
“AAUUUGHH!!” I yelped again. He stood up.
“You don’t yell at me. I don’t know how they treat doctors in.. where are you from… New York, but in California dentist is respected profession. You should treat me with such respect.”
He took the clamps and wires off my jaw.
“I’m just sayin!” I said, now aggravated, “I need a little bit of that shot! This shit hurts!”
“Doctor,” the nurse interjected, “couldn’t we just give him a little something for his pain?”
“Yeah!” I said. “Don’t you guys keep any Scotch or something around here? It is Saint Patty’s Day you know.”
The Doctor laughed. “You know there is Irish pub nearby. Maybe you meet me for drink after procedure,” he said.
“Yeah maybe, Doc. But what do you got for me now?”
“Ugh. You sound like everyone else. Why you want to use such bad language?”
“What?”
“Here. This will numb pain.” He stuck a large needle into my throbbing gums. I started to feel a little better.
“I will be back. Twenty minutes. I get lunch now.”
He came back in two hours.
…Continued…