Another toothy post – no pics

My glorious long weekend is coming to an end. After school, I get to take my mom to the dentist. Two dentists.

Tomorrow my mother gets false teeth. Only five. You'd think the world was spinning backwards or something. She's very upset. She hasn't had good experiences with dentists.

As a child, she needed a tooth pulled. Bear in mind this was 75 years ago, and dentistry has improved somewhat in the ensuing years. Anyway, the tooth wouldn't come. The dentist pulled and tugged and pounded with increasingly large hammers. Finally, he apologized, wiped the sweat from his forehead, put his knee on her chest for better leverage, and ripped the little sucker out of her face. When he finished up with her, he put her bicycle in his car and drove her home. Then he went out for some well-deserved alcoholic reassurance.

When she was pregnant with my sister (only 54 years ago now), she had a similar experience. She had split a tooth in two. She warned the dentist her teeth came out hard. He gave her the condescending smiles that doctors do when they clearly know more than their patients and offered his reassurance that all would be well. An hour later, he was shouting at his assistant to get him a bigger hammer. By the time my mother left, she was reassuring the dentist that all would be well. He said he'd never pull another of her teeth again.

So, today she is calling me in tears, terrified of what will happen. She is genuinely worried she won't live through the procedure. I guess I'll let you know tomorrow.