Apollonia was clutching her jaw the other day. “Broke a toof yefterday,” she lisped. “Emergency woot canal wast night. Tewwible. Dentist gave me too much Novocaine, and it didn’t wea’ off until midnight.”
I find baby talk enchanting. “Poor thing,” I said. “Back in Battle Ground, Washington, in the 1960s, I had a dentist who’d worked at the state prison. He gave jumbo Novocaine shots. Once he gave me one that didn’t wear off for three days.”
Apollonia stared at me darkly. “Why?” she croaked. “Why you always gotta top my story?”
“Oh, I can do better than that,” I said. “I once had a root canal without any Novocaine at all.”
She shrieked and ran away before I could tell the story.
Here it is:
While serving in the Peace Corps in Tunisia in the 1980s, I had a dental problem, and was sent to a very nice Tunisian dentist whom I still remember fondly; she liked me because I spoke good French and she could gossip with me. (I also found that I could speak French with that suction thing in my mouth, which is doing pretty well, if you ask me.) “You need a root canal,” she told me. “I know Americans prefer anesthetics, and I have Novocaine, if you prefer it. But frankly, most of my patients don’t use it. For one thing, I can work more quickly and accurately if I don’t give you Novocaine.”
“Ah,” I said. “Go ahead. Why not?”
So we did it. Honestly, it wasn’t bad. The worst part of a root canal is the drilling, which is like the Indy 500 going on inside your head; it doesn’t hurt, it’s just incredibly annoying, and you really wish it would stop, and no amount of Novocaine makes it less unpleasant.
I was very pleased with myself by the time the dentist finished the major drilling; it hadn’t really hurt a bit. Then she turned to me with a sober expression. “Okay,” she said. “I need to find out if there’s any soft tissue left inside the tooth. I can do it with a mirror and a pick, and it will take a long time, and I still won’t be sure. Or I can do it the quick way.”
“What’s the quick way?” I asked, my heart sinking.
She held up a safety pin.
I thought for a moment and chose the quick way.
There was indeed some soft tissue left inside the tooth.
Oh, reader, I will never forget that moment. I think blue flames shot out of my ears. It only lasted a millisecond, but I can still recapture it very precisely. I could even taste the pain.
But it was over in a flash.
“Okay,” she said, withdrawing the pin from my hollow tooth. “That’s all I needed to know. A little more drilling, and we’re done.”
What can I tell you? I lived through it. (An American dentist told me a few years later that it was one of the best root-canal/crown jobs he’d ever seen.)
But I still flinch whenever I see a safety pin.
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