A Dream Come True... June 10, 2008

October 21, 2018

Today was a nightmare. Literally. It's been twelve years since my last cavity and for twelve years I've been absolutely dreading my next one. I hate the dentist. I am terrified of going to the dentist. One of my worst fears ever is that someday I will need a root canal. Well, this morning I woke up, approriately after having had a nightmare about my upcoming trip to the dentist, to have to face those fears and walk into the dentist office for my appointment to have my cavity filled. Two weeks ago when I went in to have my bi-annual cleaning the dreaded news came, but it didn't sound too bad. "You have a small 'flossing' cavity in between two of your molars. Have them schedule 50 minutes for you to come see me again, and I'll see you soon." I chose to focus on the word small; a small cavity. Couldn't be so bad. Heck, my little kindergartner nephew has had a ton of them fillled lately (at no fault to my sister who's one of the only people I know who flosses her kid's teeth on a regular basis) and he survived. And he's a kid. I can be grown up about this. Mind over matter, right? Wrong. Today was a nightmare come true.

Every now and then I have a recurring nightmare involving my teeth. There are horrible crunching noises. My teeth crumble. I have somehow ground them into bits. There is terrible disfigurement inside my mouth.

Somehow at the dentist this "small" cavity turned into drilling out and replacing the filling I had done as a sixth grader when the corner of my molar got chipped off and decay ensued. Somehow my smallish "flossing" cavity morphed into needing to rework the entire tooth. Not that I don't trust my dentist. I do. I'm sure it needed it, but I completely didn't expect it - and believe me, when it comes to my teeth, I like to know what to expect. At least it wasn't a root canal.

Part of me trying to be the brave adult I should be was that I brought my MP3 player to listen to while it was all going on so that I could be distracted and/or calm(er). Right as I opened my mouth and he started to drill my nightmare began. Celine Dion started singing about someone or something being in pain; I can't remember what song it was but the actual lyric said the word pain, and just as I remembered the dentist saying the word "small" about my cavity, that's the word that stuck out at the moment. And then came the nightmarish noises - oh the drilling. It really is one of the worst sounds in all of existence. And how come there have to be so many different kinds of drills? How come even when they clean your teeth, it has to sound like a drill? All of it I hate. No matter how loud I had my music, I could still hear the drill because it was right there, inside my head. Literally. And it didn't help when the dentist pulled out yet another kind of drill and said, "This one is going to feel a little bumpy." That's when the images of my tooth nightmare came vividly back to my imaginatioin in a horrifyingly real way. It felt like he was literally sandblasting my tooth away. He probably was! By the end of his drilling it felt like my tooth had crumbled into pieces. It had! I can feel my new "small" filling with my tounge, and it's not small - it's half my tooth!

Well, that's enough whining about my tooth. I did survive. Now, hopefully, I'll have another twelve years to stew about how horrible it is to have a cavity filled.

I thought my nightmare day was over. I thought I'd reward myself for being so brave, so I took Noah to get his hair cut because he really needed one and we both thought it would be fun. The whole experience of getting his hair cut wasn't actually so bad, except that I decided to be cheap and take him to a hair cutting school to get it done. How hard can it be to cut a little boy's hair? That's like the easiest haircut to do, right? Aparently not. Poor little thing, his hair got butchered: way too short in the back and all around and way too long and uneven on the top.

When Chris came home from work and Noah woke up from his nap all was revealed, and upon second look of Noah's new hairdo it looked worse to me, not better. So Chris had an idea, "It's summer, let's buzz him!" "Oookaayyy?" I said. Chris took him into the bathroom, got out his clippers, and got started. So, something else I learned in this nightmarish day? Before you serendipitously start into a hasty, somewhat drastic plan, communicate more than you think you should with your partner in crime. I thought that I had just consented for Daddy to buzz off the top of his 'do to match the short hair on the back of his head that the haircut lady-student had given him. Daddy thought we meant to give him more of a cancer paitent type buzz. One stroke of the clippers through the top of Noah's hair and I was in a nightmare again. His cute, unruly, hair - gone. When I say gone, I mean alll gone. Bald. Again, not what I had expected. Oh well. Today's the day for that, and really he looks cute no matter what.

After completing the "buzz" Chris announced, "I like it! It's growing on me, and it will on you too." "And it'll grow back on him too..." I said.