Say Cheese

The 'Dent'ist! Till recently I had never fully realized the full import of the profession; the terror that they can instil in you.

Misfortune struck me and all of a sudden last month, I had a tingling sensation in my teeth. I should've let them tingle. As they are my teeth after all, I decided to interfere instead. Big mistake!

First I did an extensive inquiry as to the best doctor in town. I wanted an older dentist as the newer, younger ones would normally not have recouped their investment on education & the infrastructure and hence would look at me as a milkman would look at his cow.

Thanks to my friends who did enough due diligence, I finally found a dentist who was old, avuncular and fit the bill. But one thing I forgot was that old habits die hard. In fact they seldom die. Shortly you'd know why.

I visited the dentist. The moment he came to know that I can speak in English, quack in Hindi and the local vernacular is all Greek and Latin, I could see a glow in his eyes, or at least now I imagine that there had been one. I couldn't recognize the high-fives exchanged silently through eyes between him and his assistants.

After a couple of X-rays of my teeth, the dentist's assistant, bless her soul, identified that root canal treatment was needed for only one of my teeth. The doctor came in for review and almost determined that only one tooth was healthy.

He prescribed three root canal treatments and two extractions besides scaling and other peripheral treatments. His another assistant pulled me aside and started going over through the long list of treatments and appending costs to that. She finally mentioned a huge amount and termed that, I swear, as the total "project" cost. I was truly done in.

For example, the dentist prescribed removal of right molar saying that it is leaning on its neighbours like some do in a crowded bus. Then he mandated that left molar should be removed saying that it is too far from its neighbour and for being the cause of a cavity. He mentioned that my upper molar too has to be removed sometime down the line (meaning he doesn't need all the money now) as it has the potential of hitting the lower molar. Wait! There isn't one lower molar now, er, the lower gums it has to be.

I was a greatly disturbed by a vision. On my marriage day, I sit for the infinite and one number of photographs alongwith my wife. The photographer intones, "Say Cheese" and every one of the infinite and one times, I reveal a perfect set of gums; just gums. Soft, pink, a set of nice upper and lower gums with no pearly white intruding line in-between.

I was impressed by the dentist's "take no hostages" attitude. Anything standing has to be yanked out, was his mantra. Any person was seen as with the potential of generating 32x income for him.

I was very polite to the dentist. After all he is the person who drilled, cauterized, hammered (Oh, yeah) and scraped my teeth. No sense being rude. In the course of the treatment, I could see many of the hardware store implements used in my mouth for the scaling, root canal and the ultimate, the tooth extraction. Tooth extraction itself, I can blog a separate post on.

Over a period of 3 weeks and twice as many sessions, it dawned on me why the world quivers at the word, "dentist appointment". But I also came to realize how lucrative the profession is. In fact the idea of marrying a dentist's daughter is now very appealing to me. But I'd never marry a dentist. It would be a bit dumb; she would have all the implements of torture and I'd have what was left of my teeth. Certainly not a very good idea.

However before accepting any such proposal, I'd ask my dentist father-in-law to-be, that I have to speak to his daughter in private. Once granted the audience, I would get up close and tight, and while gazing deeply into her would fondly murmur, "Say Cheese". Just in case.