(Don’t blame me, blame Little Shop of Horrors. Also, if you have a visceral hatred of talking about dentistry, feel free to skip this one. I don’t blame you one bit.)
My dentist appointment went fine, other than costing rather more than I would have liked. In fact, for the first time in my adult life, I wasn’t told that I needed to floss more. This has been a goal of mine for at least the last decade, and while I’ve been flossing regularly for years, apparently the combination of keto and overall reduced consumption was finally enough to pass muster with the dental hygienist. Success!
Also, still no cavities, for 37ish years and counting. (I’m not sure when my first baby tooth came in.)
Like many people, I don’t like going to the dentist at all. Perhaps unlike most people, my problem is 100% focused on a single thing: the water-pick device that modern hygienists use for scaling the plaque off of your teeth much more efficiently than the hooked picks (although they still use those as well). Something about the frequency the water-pick runs at makes my entire head ache with the sound when it’s in my mouth, and on top of that it inevitably zings some of the nerves in my gums as they knock off the build-up, which makes me jump… and so I spend the entire time in a state of nervous shaky tension waiting for those zings, making the whole experience indescribably worse. It’s basically a solid fifteen to twenty minutes of my body in complete and total fight-or-flight quivering-in-my-boots fear, except that I can neither fight nor fly. I feel deeply drained after every visit.
Imagine how bad it’d be if I had cavities and they had to break out a drill. Uggggggggggggggh.
Anyhow, that particular obligation has been done and dusted for the next six months. As a first semi-major “health” thing since I’ve retired, it could hardly have gone better, so for that at least I’m quite pleased. I’m also very, very pleased that I shouldn’t have to go back for quite a while. That water-pick. That water-pick.
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