The Sum of All Fears

From Little Shop of Horrors (1986)
Seymour: [helpless in dentist chair] What’s that?
Orin: [enthusiastically] A drill.
Seymour: It’s rusty!
Orin: It’s an antique. They don’t make ’em like this any more. Sturdy. Heavy. Dull!   I’m gonna want some gas fer this.
Seymour: Oh, thank God. I thought you weren’t gonna use any.
Orin: Oh, the gas isn’t for you Seymour, it’s for me. You see, I wanna really enjoy this.

 

But... we only just met!

 

Tomorrow morning is my dreaded dentist appointment.  I am not mentally prepared.  As is fairly common among human beings who have teeth, I am passionate in both my fear and my loathing regarding dentist visits.  This is exceptionally unfair to my dentist, who is quite lovely and has never once done anything to traumatize me.  The dentist of my childhood was also perfectly nice and nothing at all like Steve Martin in Little Shop of Horrors.

Here is a complete(ish) list of why I hate going to the dentist, including both the reasonable reasons and the ridiculous ones:

1. I was dumb enough to watch Little Shop of Horrors at a young and impressionable age.
2. I don’t floss enough (please don’t judge) and even though I lie to them about it, the hygienists always know.  Some of them are pretty gruesome in their descriptions of the oral hell that the vengeful gum gods are going to put me through for my sins.  Apparently recent science has also given them the ammunition that if you don’t floss enough, you’ll get heart disease, so I’ve heard that one a few times now too.
3. Something that they give you there – it might be the fluoride wash or the toothpaste, I don’t know – leaves me intensely nauseous for almost an entire  day afterward.
4. The sharp, sharp tools of the trade, which would not look out-of-place in a Bond torture scene.
5. Blood.
6. They might actually find something wrong and I will have to go back sooner than six months and for something more serious than cleaning and gouging and it will cost enough to empty my savings account and max out my credit card.
7. The time the hygienist (I’m not making this up) accidentally poured fluoride spit all over my arm.  That actually was pretty traumatic.
8. The noises: the drills, the scraping, the muffled whimpering.

What a fantastic way to start a Saturday.  Wish me luck!