Dental damn

This could very well make me insane, but when I walk out of a dentist’s office after a cleaning, my teeth always feel cold.

Like, sweaterless in winter cold. Two weeks in a meat locker cold. Swimming with polar bears in a pair of boxer shorts cold.

And furthermore, cold.

Actually I guess it’s the gums that would give me that oh-so-frigid feeling; I’m footloose and cavity-free, so no exposed nerves on these pearly whites, no siree. That doesn’t make the chilly sensation any less concerning, though. Was the inside of my mouth so coated with a germy accretion of junk that removing it was like stripping naked in the middle of a blizzard? This is but one of the questions that plague me when I leave the dentist, air whooshing freely around my sparkling incisors.

What makes a dental visit so disconcerting -- even if you’ve got a clean bill of oral health -- is that it forces you to think about things you wouldn’t ordinarily think about. I mean sure, we brush regularly, and some of us even have the discipline and steel-eyed will to floss, but these are actions we perform automatically, without really pausing to consider the reasons. When you visit a dentist, especially one who knows how to guilt-trip, there’s a real chance of succumbing to panic. I should be doing more, you think to yourself. I should be scraping my tongue. I should be swishing with mouthwash, or buffing my molars with a Zamboni machine.

Let’s talk about flossing for a second, OK? It sucks. Everyone’s gotten the lecture about it at some point, and every dentist worth his salt has advocated this activity as a means of preventing gum disease and tooth decay. They’re absolutely right about this. If you want to maintain a healthy mouth, you really should be flossing. Yet it’s one of the most difficult routines a person can possibly initiate. It’s hard to put a finger on exactly why -- it’s not physically taxing, no heavy lifting or aerial acrobatics, and it doesn’t take an especially long time, usually just long enough to make it through the first act of an “Everybody Loves Raymond” rerun. There’s no paperwork to fill out, no “Flossing 101” courses to take at the local community college. There’s no excuse not to do it.

Unless, like me, you’re adept at rationalizing bad behavior. If that’s the case, then the argument against flossing goes like this: It’s a pain in the everloving neck. It’s icky. You sit there for 10 minutes with a wet, limp piece of string, idly removing clumps of carrot cake from betwixt your bicuspids, and at the end of this soul-crushing ordeal you’ve essentially got a slimy food necklace studded with day-old ravioli meat and Lucky Charms marshmallows. Sure, you can thread the floss through those little plastic handles they sell at the pharmacy, but that’s like putting a diva dress on a duck. The packaging may be prettier, but it still quacks.

Try explaining that to the hygienist when she’s shoving that tiny mirror down into your ribcage.

There are few feelings of powerlessness more complete than being in a dentist’s chair. It would be one thing if we could voice some kind of protest, but our mouths are occupied, so the most we can do to communicate is grunt, howl or make obscene gestures with our hands -- which has the potential to shock the dentist, always a bad move when they’re scraping plaque with a metal pick. Nobody wants to leave the office with a third nostril.

And then there’s the uncertainty. Mouths are tricky things, and while everything may seem hunky dory, there’s no telling what the doc may find: Abscesses, cavities, renegade wisdom teeth, Rolex watches, blood diamonds, Egyptian pottery and old VHS tapes may be lurking in the dark. You’re stuck in this weird limbo, not knowing whether you’ll leave without incident or receive some crushing diagnosis, the discovery of a shameful flaw in your otherwise pristine piehole. With my luck I’d be the first person in history afflicted with some as-yet-undiscovered oral disease. “Why Jeff, it appears as though your molars have grown tiny feet!” Great. Now I’ve got to floss my teeth and my mouth-feet.

Despite these grumblings, a dental visit doesn’t have to be all bad. I had to have my wisdom teeth removed one summer when I was in high school, and I thought it would be a terrifying experience -- all the needles and gas and subsequent room-temperature yogurt. Horror stories have come out of that operating room, so maybe I got lucky, but my extraction adventure was a bigger hoot than riding the monorails at Disney World. A woman in a white coat stuck a needle in my arm, a man with a blue facemask put a plastic implement over my mouth and nose, and after breathing deeply …

Well, that’s just the thing. I don’t know what happened next. It wasn’t like waking up after sleep, because when that happens you get the sense that time has passed, that the world has kept on spinning beyond the thin film of your shuttered eyelids. Not the case here. I was instantly transported from an operating chair to a couch in a dark room, staring at a television screen showing a cartoon of a talking tooth. I think the tooth was giving me instructions on how to recover over the following several days, but I couldn’t hear him, because I was laughing so hard I was asphyxiating myself. Turns out, you see, that I was higher than Willie Nelson.

Which is pretty much how I felt for about two or three days. So if you have a dental procedure coming up, folks, fret not -- there’s always the possibility that you could stumble out of that room most righteously stoned.

And if your teeth are super cold, you may not even notice.