My dentist hates doing root canals so he had a stunt double do mine. Of course I wasn't fooled. Not only did she look nothing like him, the way she operated couldn't be more different. There's an expression: "measure twice, cut once." Actually, in Russian, the expression is "measure seven times, cut once." Well my dentist is to the Russian version as the Russian version is to the American one. He can measure all day, muttering little rhymes and anecdotes into his beard, and then cut sometime next month and in a different mouth altogether. He's slow, methodical, slow, and really really slow. However, he's supposedly good at what he does and I'm definitely good at providing him with a constant inflow of work material, so we're loyal to one another.
His replacement was the exact opposite. If my dentist is more like a lizard who can wait all day to strike at that unsuspecting fly, she was more like a wasp - flying right into that bee colony and snapping off all their heads, or in my case - flying in from all directions and never letting the drill's buzz reverberations inside my mouth die out.
Nevertheless, I ended up sitting there with my mouth open for two hours and forty-five minutes. The problem was that this was a molar tooth and they have more canals than Mars ever did. Each canal has to be cleaned out separately. At least one made-up statistic says: 75% of molars have 3 canals, 24.99% have 4 canals, but then there's that nasty 0.01% that have 173. Luckily I fell in the 24.99%, otherwise I'd still be sitting in that chair.
She also used some interesting aids that my dentist never used. She put what amounted to a hand-made elastic funnel into my mouth in order to isolate the tooth from the rest of me. You can perform oral sex with that thing in your mouth and the tooth will be innocent of the whole affair. I kept wondering the whole time what it looked like from her point of view, so eventually I asked her for a bathroom break and went to take a look. The dentist's aide passed me in the hall and nearly died laughing. When I reached the bathroom I understood why. It looked pretty ridiculous. The closest I can find on the Internet is this:
which unfortunately looks nothing like it. This looks even less like it:
and this:
is completely unrelated.
Unfortunately, as soon as I entered the bathroom, I felt an irresistable urge to pee. I got in position and suddenly realized that there was absolutely no way I could see where to aim, with this all-but-Japanese-invention protruding from my face. I had to orient myself by sound. Does that sound like it's hitting water? No, that must be a magazine or something. Toilet paper...floor...wall...."hey! Quit that!"...window...trash bin...aha! Found it!
You know how when you wake up in the morning, you're like two feet taller till your spine snaps back to its normal length? I think there's a similar rule for jaws. When I closed my jaw after three hours of holding it open, I couldn't quite fit the two halves together. It took a few hours for everything to get back in their right places. If this is a trend for other parts of our body, I don't understand how astronauts deal with it. Seems like they'd just explode in slow motion.
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