Dental work

I had to do an emergency dental appointment today. It boiled down to "chunk of a filling went missing, and another tooth decided to light up in sympathy with its fucked up comrade."

I've had situations where a nerve lights up and the pain is so bad that the tooth becomes your entire universe. This wasn't quite that, but it had that feeling of "you're just one hot sip of tea hitting that thing the wrong way," so I got the first appointment I could.

It's always a mystery, too. What are they going to find? How fucked are you? I got off pretty easy this time, but it was close to three hours in the chair.

Several years ago I experienced my first panic attack, and it happened in a dentist's chair. They had me leaning way back, they had a large bite block in really far back, and the technician was asleep at the wheel on the suction. It kept happening and I kept having this sense that I was going to suffocate, so I panicked and had to end the appointment.

That was weird. I've never been overcome by fear like that before. Especially weird because reasoning it out didn't matter. I knew, objectively, that my airway was clear enough to breathe, but it didn't matter.

A few years later, at another appointment, similar circumstances arose and I had another panic attack. This time around the dentist was prepared for hard cases like me and gave me ... something? Al swears it had to have come out of the dentist's purse, because it was delivered crushed up and sort of poured under my tongue with a folded up Post-It note. That was interesting, because in a few minutes I became very disinvested from anything going on around me. Al remembers me being weirdly interested in playing the latest St. Vincent album on the way home, and I don't even really like St. Vincent that much.

So today was my first visit since that. This time I had AirPods and sunglasses and was dressed comfortably. While I waited for the local, I practiced deep breathing.

They tipped me back, and I began to feel the panic creep back in. I kept my breathing steady, but wow it was hard. And they had two teeth to do stuff on, so I was in that chair for a while. At one point I thought I was going to have to tap out. I think the music helped me get over that hump. It was just the playlist I have for motorcycle rides, and it's all over the place. Shuffled, there was the whipsaw of Minutemen segueing into Son Volt careening off into Butthole Surfers, and I think that did the job, because I got back on top of things and stayed in the chair, it just sucked. 

I think I really needed to do that unmedicated and fully lucid, though. Thinking back on the experience, even half a day later, I am not having the weird flutter in my belly or quickening of my pulse I used to have when I thought of going to the dentist.