King Henry's Crown
Brandon Yu
I don’t care how old I am. I will always hate going to the dentist.
Here’s the situation: my tooth hurts. After a preliminary check-up, Dr. Hovida—a brisk, no-nonsense woman who works with the efficiency of a trackside engineer at the Indy 500—tells me to make another appointment.
“You fractured a filling in your left molar,” she says. “If you don’t get a crown, you’ll lose that tooth.
Since I plan on keeping my chompers for old age, I agree immediately. It’s settled: on Tuesday, February 16th, I’m going to turn my left molar into a monarch. I’ve given him a name already: King Henry.
Truth is, I’m terrified. I haven’t been to the dentist since graduating high school, and I’m not looking forward to having my teeth tinkered with. My gut curls into a ball as I sit in the waiting room. A couple minutes later, the dental assistant pokes her head into the waiting room to announce her next victim. She’s wearing a surgical mask and navy-blue scrubs, brown hair pulled back in a ponytail.
“Brandon?” she says.
I stand up and step inside the hallway.
“How’s it going?” she says.
“Pretty good, pretty good,” I say. I’m actually doing pretty bad, pretty bad, but I’m not letting her know that.
As I follow her through the clean, carpeted maze of offices and treatment rooms, I hear the high whine of electric drills and the watery hiss of a saliva ejector. She sits me in a room cramped with the latest torture technology only money can buy—rows of sharp, gleaming metal instruments, radiation death beams (some people call them X-Rays, but I know them for what they really are), dental moulds, metal forceps, and syringes.
It’s like being in a politically-correct Saw movie. I’m half-expecting Jigsaw’s creepy clown mask to appear on the monitor in front of me through a static haze. “You don’t know me, but I know you,” it will say. “I want to play a game. In your life, you’ve made a mockery of your teeth by only flossing a couple times after the dentist and then forgetting about it completely for the next six months. Now we will see how you feel about it once I make a mockery of you.”
Instead, there’s a game show with a Steve Harvey-knockoff and a massive, grinning audience with a collective IQ of 1. It doesn’t ease my anxiety, but then Sandra returns. “Open wide,” she says.
I do my best impression of a feeding Mosasaurus from Jurassic Park. For the next ten minutes, Sandra inspects my mouth while I rethink my life choices.
I’m paying an obscene amount of money to get a tall, pretty nurse to stick her gloved fingers into my mouth. This seems like a highly unusual and complicated kind of foreplay at first, but it’s actually just your everyday trip to the dentist. I have a theory this is the only reliable way to get an American to go to one, because no man will willingly pay a grand for someone to stick sharp metal objects into their face unless it’s a pretty girl doing it.
Even so, the feeling of a dental hook scraping against my teeth is uncomfortable, and I start moving around. Sandra hands me what looks like a misshapen kiwi. It’s actually a football. “It’s a stress ball,” she says. “Trust me. It helps.”
Before I have a chance to use it, Dr. Hovida strides in like an army general. Without a word, she straps on a headlamp—the kind West Virginia coal miners use—and produces a syringe. She jabs the back of my inner cheek with a needle while I crush my football. Suddenly, it feels like one side of my mouth is coated in cold rubber.
“We’ll give you a few minutes for that to set in,” Sandra says.
When they return, half my face is numb. It’s like having a stroke.
“How do you feel?” Sandra says.
“I can’t feel my face,” I say.
“Great!” she says, smiling with her eyes. The two of them close in, hovering over my vision like giants. Dr. Hovida pulls out the electric drill and gives it a couple experimental whirrs. I hope that wasn’t on purpose.
“Will it hurt?” I say.
“It’ll ache a little,” Dr. Hovida says. This is dentist-speak for “You will literally want to DIE,” but of course she doesn’t say that.
Enter the drill. At this point, some death metal (Iron Maiden’s “Run For the Hills” is the first thing that comes to mind) would be appropriate, instead of this peppy Meghan Trainor shit they’re playing on the speakers. In addition to being tortured by electric drills, prodding hooks, and diabolical needles, I have to listen to her tell me it’s all about that bass while I death-grip the armrests, trying not to faint.
There’s that icy, deeply disturbing ache in my gums as she starts turning my left molar into a little Michelangelo sculpture with her dental drill. When the pain becomes overwhelming, I pinch the sides of my forefingers with my thumbnails, forgetting about my football. It will leave red grooves in the skin later, but I don’t care.
It doesn’t help that I’m wearing one of those cheap, plastic-framed sunglasses that seem to have found their way into every dentistry in America. I used to think dentists gave them to you to block out the pearlescent glare of the operating lights, but I know better now: it’s easier for them to dehumanize me if they can’t see my eyes. After spending eight hours a day staring into people’s mouths, I’m sure most dentists would rather not associate the macabre horror of bloody gums and bad breath with the human race.
“Aaarrrgghh aarrggh ggghhhh,” I say.
Dr. Hovida plunges the needle into the back of my cheek again. At last, the two of them sit back, admiring their handiwork. After peering at a ghostly X-ray of my teeth, Dr. Hovida steps out of the room, letting Sandra fiddle with my teeth some more.
“And there we go,” Sandra finally says with an exhausted flourish. I sit up slowly, not quite sure where I am anymore. “You can relax now, Brandon. The worst is over.”
“We’re done?” I say, disbelieving. “We’re really done?”
“Yes,” Sandra says. She spins around in her swivel chair and opens a calendar on Word. “So when’s a good time for your next appointment?”
“My what?” I say.
“We only installed a temporary filling,” Sandra explains with a kind of holy patience. “You’ll have to come back in three weeks for the actual crown.”
“Oh.”
On the way home, the numbing agent in my gums begins to spread to the rest of my face. Three weeks, I think, with grave, impending despair. As if in resistance, my left eye musters an involuntary twitch.
Oh, the things I do for my teeth.
Here’s the situation: my tooth hurts. After a preliminary check-up, Dr. Hovida—a brisk, no-nonsense woman who works with the efficiency of a trackside engineer at the Indy 500—tells me to make another appointment.
“You fractured a filling in your left molar,” she says. “If you don’t get a crown, you’ll lose that tooth.
Since I plan on keeping my chompers for old age, I agree immediately. It’s settled: on Tuesday, February 16th, I’m going to turn my left molar into a monarch. I’ve given him a name already: King Henry.
Truth is, I’m terrified. I haven’t been to the dentist since graduating high school, and I’m not looking forward to having my teeth tinkered with. My gut curls into a ball as I sit in the waiting room. A couple minutes later, the dental assistant pokes her head into the waiting room to announce her next victim. She’s wearing a surgical mask and navy-blue scrubs, brown hair pulled back in a ponytail.
“Brandon?” she says.
I stand up and step inside the hallway.
“How’s it going?” she says.
“Pretty good, pretty good,” I say. I’m actually doing pretty bad, pretty bad, but I’m not letting her know that.
As I follow her through the clean, carpeted maze of offices and treatment rooms, I hear the high whine of electric drills and the watery hiss of a saliva ejector. She sits me in a room cramped with the latest torture technology only money can buy—rows of sharp, gleaming metal instruments, radiation death beams (some people call them X-Rays, but I know them for what they really are), dental moulds, metal forceps, and syringes.
It’s like being in a politically-correct Saw movie. I’m half-expecting Jigsaw’s creepy clown mask to appear on the monitor in front of me through a static haze. “You don’t know me, but I know you,” it will say. “I want to play a game. In your life, you’ve made a mockery of your teeth by only flossing a couple times after the dentist and then forgetting about it completely for the next six months. Now we will see how you feel about it once I make a mockery of you.”
Instead, there’s a game show with a Steve Harvey-knockoff and a massive, grinning audience with a collective IQ of 1. It doesn’t ease my anxiety, but then Sandra returns. “Open wide,” she says.
I do my best impression of a feeding Mosasaurus from Jurassic Park. For the next ten minutes, Sandra inspects my mouth while I rethink my life choices.
I’m paying an obscene amount of money to get a tall, pretty nurse to stick her gloved fingers into my mouth. This seems like a highly unusual and complicated kind of foreplay at first, but it’s actually just your everyday trip to the dentist. I have a theory this is the only reliable way to get an American to go to one, because no man will willingly pay a grand for someone to stick sharp metal objects into their face unless it’s a pretty girl doing it.
Even so, the feeling of a dental hook scraping against my teeth is uncomfortable, and I start moving around. Sandra hands me what looks like a misshapen kiwi. It’s actually a football. “It’s a stress ball,” she says. “Trust me. It helps.”
Before I have a chance to use it, Dr. Hovida strides in like an army general. Without a word, she straps on a headlamp—the kind West Virginia coal miners use—and produces a syringe. She jabs the back of my inner cheek with a needle while I crush my football. Suddenly, it feels like one side of my mouth is coated in cold rubber.
“We’ll give you a few minutes for that to set in,” Sandra says.
When they return, half my face is numb. It’s like having a stroke.
“How do you feel?” Sandra says.
“I can’t feel my face,” I say.
“Great!” she says, smiling with her eyes. The two of them close in, hovering over my vision like giants. Dr. Hovida pulls out the electric drill and gives it a couple experimental whirrs. I hope that wasn’t on purpose.
“Will it hurt?” I say.
“It’ll ache a little,” Dr. Hovida says. This is dentist-speak for “You will literally want to DIE,” but of course she doesn’t say that.
Enter the drill. At this point, some death metal (Iron Maiden’s “Run For the Hills” is the first thing that comes to mind) would be appropriate, instead of this peppy Meghan Trainor shit they’re playing on the speakers. In addition to being tortured by electric drills, prodding hooks, and diabolical needles, I have to listen to her tell me it’s all about that bass while I death-grip the armrests, trying not to faint.
There’s that icy, deeply disturbing ache in my gums as she starts turning my left molar into a little Michelangelo sculpture with her dental drill. When the pain becomes overwhelming, I pinch the sides of my forefingers with my thumbnails, forgetting about my football. It will leave red grooves in the skin later, but I don’t care.
It doesn’t help that I’m wearing one of those cheap, plastic-framed sunglasses that seem to have found their way into every dentistry in America. I used to think dentists gave them to you to block out the pearlescent glare of the operating lights, but I know better now: it’s easier for them to dehumanize me if they can’t see my eyes. After spending eight hours a day staring into people’s mouths, I’m sure most dentists would rather not associate the macabre horror of bloody gums and bad breath with the human race.
“Aaarrrgghh aarrggh ggghhhh,” I say.
Dr. Hovida plunges the needle into the back of my cheek again. At last, the two of them sit back, admiring their handiwork. After peering at a ghostly X-ray of my teeth, Dr. Hovida steps out of the room, letting Sandra fiddle with my teeth some more.
“And there we go,” Sandra finally says with an exhausted flourish. I sit up slowly, not quite sure where I am anymore. “You can relax now, Brandon. The worst is over.”
“We’re done?” I say, disbelieving. “We’re really done?”
“Yes,” Sandra says. She spins around in her swivel chair and opens a calendar on Word. “So when’s a good time for your next appointment?”
“My what?” I say.
“We only installed a temporary filling,” Sandra explains with a kind of holy patience. “You’ll have to come back in three weeks for the actual crown.”
“Oh.”
On the way home, the numbing agent in my gums begins to spread to the rest of my face. Three weeks, I think, with grave, impending despair. As if in resistance, my left eye musters an involuntary twitch.
Oh, the things I do for my teeth.
|
Brandon Yu is a college student and experienced author based in South Florida with a passion for storytelling. Brandon has been published in Waymark Literary Magazine. When not busy studying for finals, Brandon likes to go out for a jog.
|
|
