Have You Ever Had A Root Canal?
There are few things worse to anticipate than the dentist. Once when I was a kid, my mother sent me to the dentist alone. Big mistake. I never went. I trembled like a rat in a storefront two blocks away as the appointment passed. I just couldn't make those final steps into his dreaded presence.
A dentist can bring the mightiest of men to repentance. On the other hand, there are people out there who handle a dentist like a horse tail flicking away a fly. They are oblivious to fillings, crowns, extractions, and root canals even without a drop of Novocain. They can fall fast sleep in the chair like Rip Van Winkle even if they were in a casket sleeping on top of Count Dracula himself. Others grab the chair arms in a death grip as if he were headed directly into the World Trade Center on 9/11 with dilated eyes and soaring blood pressure. They gaze around at the lights, hoses, needles, and drills like they were sitting in a medieval Counter-Reformation torture chamber trying to think of something to recant that would get them out of this inevitable horror about to descend upon them.
One of the things I have noticed about myself as soon as I step into the dentist's lair is that I suddenly become as if I were introduced on stage at a comedy club. Looking for emotional relief, I start cracking jokes and making humor with the receptionist, the nurses, the dentist, and the glum patients sitting with me in the dock. It starts the minute I open the door of the joint. My rate of speech accelerates and words flow from me like a river. I start making up quick-witted lines on the spot, things I had never thought of before. By the time I get into the chair, I am killing them in the office. This all started when I was a kid and met the stooge who did an extraction on me and then dropped the bloody tooth into my palm when he had finished. My mind stamped a snapshot of that tooth in my hand on my brain as if I was holding the bloody head of John the Baptist.
As the years passed, it took all the horsepower I could gather to approach a dentist's office. But whenever I did, I immediately went into automatic pilot and started my show business routine as a comic. All this was attended by another stream of dental dismay that was developing as the result of the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. For years, Carson made jokes about dentists and one particular procedure that sounded like, and grew in proportion to, something similar to a Civil War amputation - the root canal. I had no idea what a root canal was, but the whole thing portended something malignant. I imagined some freaking dentist bearing down hard, cracking through the enamel, burying the drill deep into the bone, and breaking off the drill bit so that it was sticking up out of my tooth like a bone in a compound fracture. I thought the incomparable pain of kidney stones would be preferred to a root canal. Anytime the word "root" is used in anything, it sounds to me like we are getting close to the epicenter of horrendous pain. "Canal" didn't sound good either. The path to this agony was through a narrow channel by way of a very narrow Dremel-like, high speed, diamond tipped drill that sounded like a mechanic taking lug nuts off of a car at Tire Kingdom. I conjured up that picture or either some kind of needle that could penetrate a microscopic opening and descend through tooth and gum till it bottomed out on bare bone. Anyway, I almost had to turn off the TV every time Carson referred to a root canal. I used to say to myself after hearing him bemoan this calamity upon the poor devil who had to endure it, "I'll take anything. Give me the flu, lay the shingles on me, anything...but may I never in this life have to sustain a root canal." I figured if cancer was hell, then a root canal must be purgatory.
A few years ago I came flying up out of the bed to a sit up position during the night with a throbbing pain on the right side of my mouth. I had this agony appear a few times before for some reason, but it always went away. It was there again the next night. By the weekend, it was off and on every few hours. By Sunday, we were talking minutes of hell and minutes of heaven when it stopped. I knew I now had to give account of myself before the man with the leather hood and drill. All I could see was Steve Martin as that dentist in "Little Ship of Horrors" sitting up on my chest with a jack-hammer tipped with a swirling rasp as he leaned all his weight on me while chips of my teeth flew around the inside of my mouth like a box of Chiclets in a blender. The pain was really mounting up by Monday morning.
Finally, I grabbed that phone like it was a life preserver and demanded to speak to the dentist. When I described the nightmare I was experiencing, he said my condition demanded a specialist. He gave me his number. Now the word "specialist" in medicine is a word that makes me put my hands over my ears and holler real loud, "I CAN"T HEAR YOU!". It signals that one has a condition outside of the norm and calls for somebody to handle a specially troublesome case that requires years of additional medical training because it is complex and...life-threatening. If cancer is hell and a root canal is purgatory, then therapy by a specialist is a treatment performed by Josef Mengele and reserved for the Hitlers who go there.
I could sense panic setting in. I hesitated. But just then, the pain from my jaw fired down my right arm. I was actually losing strength on the right side. I seized the phone like I had been bitten by a black mamba and punched out the specialist's number like lightning. I screamed into the phone that I wanted in there NOW! Nonchalantly the secretary mumbled, "Late afternoon." She apparently had seen a lot of dental midgets turn into dental marines when the flames of hell were licking up their jaws and down their appendages. Just let me say that when the hour of my appointment arrived, I was prepared to drive my car into the front window of the office. I stomped in there with authority. I wasn't going to take any crap about waiting for my turn. I was there for business RIGHT NOW, and I expected the doors to fly open and be ushered immediately into the arms of sweet relief. For the first time in my life, I looked upon a dentist's face as if beholding the Apostle Paul.
Had a patient been in my dental chair when I got in there, I would have picked him up and thrown him through the glass. I was under condemnation. Regardless, by the time I had hit the front door, I was doing one-liners like Rodney Dangerfield at the Purple Onion and rattling off clever comebacks like the world's fastest talking man all at the same time. The dentist and the nurses were laughing their heads off, and the victims lined up behind me like cattle were cackling nervously. The dental dwarfs behind me would take all the comic relief they could stand. I jumped into the chair like it was my first time at Disneyland and I was about to take a ride on Space Mountain. The angel before me told me to open my mouth so he could check to see which tooth was the culprit. Believe it or not, the moron took what looked like a tool punch out of a Craftsman tool box and set it on each tooth while he took a little HAMMER! and tapped his way down the line from tooth to tooth. It was an odd feeling and not something I would recommend, but when he got to the one that opened the door to hell and slammed down on it, I lunged forward as if I had been hit with voltage from Florida's Old Sparky.
My back arched and formed an "O" with the lounge chair beneath me. He had found the trouble-maker, and as far as I was concerned, it was time to end this misery and go to work. But no. This fool wanted to test his findings with a backup. If I had known then what I know now, I would have vaulted from that chair and crashed through the table and tools and straight-armed both this moron and his assistant while making my own door out of that place. I was praying that this guy could come up with a more humane way to test his theory than something like that hammer and punch when he pulls out a wax birthday candle, a HOT WAX birthday candle. That looked innocent enough. What harm could he do with warm wax after slinging away with that hammer? I opened my pie hole, and he merely laid the hot wax from the candle on the tooth that had indicated it was the highway to hell.
I have always been fascinated with astronomy. I once had a telescope that would penetrate far into space to see things there not seen by the naked eye, but when this idiot touched that tooth with that hot wax, I beheld the entire universe and every star in it. My scream was immediate, and this bonehead screamed out the two words that almost precipitated my first stroke: "ROOT CANAL!!" I nearly passed out beneath the load of it all. All of the Johnny Carson shows flashed before me like Cinerama. Again, an after-shock effect of the hot wax discharged another jolt of brimstone up the side of my head and down my right arm. All fear dissolved instantly. Even if anesthesia had never been invented, I would have begged him to help me strap on the seat belt and give me the handle bars.
It was over within an hour. And it was painless. Totally painless. With instant relief. I kissed him, addressed him as "Sir", and pumped his right hand like it was a cistern. It was the easiest dental procedure I have ever had in my life. I would go down there every day if dentistry was that easy. I want to tell you that if you are Wally Cox when it comes to the dentist and you are facing a root canal, you can go in there as if surrounded by the Alien, King Kong, a coven of witches, the Wolf Man, and an army of vampires all rolled into one and be as if you are the Invisible Man. You have NOTHING to fear. Last night my wife told me to either shut up, or slow down and stop talking so fast, and to knock it off with all the Henny Youngman wisecracks. You see, this afternoon I have to go have my teeth cleaned.
A dentist can bring the mightiest of men to repentance. On the other hand, there are people out there who handle a dentist like a horse tail flicking away a fly. They are oblivious to fillings, crowns, extractions, and root canals even without a drop of Novocain. They can fall fast sleep in the chair like Rip Van Winkle even if they were in a casket sleeping on top of Count Dracula himself. Others grab the chair arms in a death grip as if he were headed directly into the World Trade Center on 9/11 with dilated eyes and soaring blood pressure. They gaze around at the lights, hoses, needles, and drills like they were sitting in a medieval Counter-Reformation torture chamber trying to think of something to recant that would get them out of this inevitable horror about to descend upon them.
One of the things I have noticed about myself as soon as I step into the dentist's lair is that I suddenly become as if I were introduced on stage at a comedy club. Looking for emotional relief, I start cracking jokes and making humor with the receptionist, the nurses, the dentist, and the glum patients sitting with me in the dock. It starts the minute I open the door of the joint. My rate of speech accelerates and words flow from me like a river. I start making up quick-witted lines on the spot, things I had never thought of before. By the time I get into the chair, I am killing them in the office. This all started when I was a kid and met the stooge who did an extraction on me and then dropped the bloody tooth into my palm when he had finished. My mind stamped a snapshot of that tooth in my hand on my brain as if I was holding the bloody head of John the Baptist.
As the years passed, it took all the horsepower I could gather to approach a dentist's office. But whenever I did, I immediately went into automatic pilot and started my show business routine as a comic. All this was attended by another stream of dental dismay that was developing as the result of the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. For years, Carson made jokes about dentists and one particular procedure that sounded like, and grew in proportion to, something similar to a Civil War amputation - the root canal. I had no idea what a root canal was, but the whole thing portended something malignant. I imagined some freaking dentist bearing down hard, cracking through the enamel, burying the drill deep into the bone, and breaking off the drill bit so that it was sticking up out of my tooth like a bone in a compound fracture. I thought the incomparable pain of kidney stones would be preferred to a root canal. Anytime the word "root" is used in anything, it sounds to me like we are getting close to the epicenter of horrendous pain. "Canal" didn't sound good either. The path to this agony was through a narrow channel by way of a very narrow Dremel-like, high speed, diamond tipped drill that sounded like a mechanic taking lug nuts off of a car at Tire Kingdom. I conjured up that picture or either some kind of needle that could penetrate a microscopic opening and descend through tooth and gum till it bottomed out on bare bone. Anyway, I almost had to turn off the TV every time Carson referred to a root canal. I used to say to myself after hearing him bemoan this calamity upon the poor devil who had to endure it, "I'll take anything. Give me the flu, lay the shingles on me, anything...but may I never in this life have to sustain a root canal." I figured if cancer was hell, then a root canal must be purgatory.
A few years ago I came flying up out of the bed to a sit up position during the night with a throbbing pain on the right side of my mouth. I had this agony appear a few times before for some reason, but it always went away. It was there again the next night. By the weekend, it was off and on every few hours. By Sunday, we were talking minutes of hell and minutes of heaven when it stopped. I knew I now had to give account of myself before the man with the leather hood and drill. All I could see was Steve Martin as that dentist in "Little Ship of Horrors" sitting up on my chest with a jack-hammer tipped with a swirling rasp as he leaned all his weight on me while chips of my teeth flew around the inside of my mouth like a box of Chiclets in a blender. The pain was really mounting up by Monday morning.
Finally, I grabbed that phone like it was a life preserver and demanded to speak to the dentist. When I described the nightmare I was experiencing, he said my condition demanded a specialist. He gave me his number. Now the word "specialist" in medicine is a word that makes me put my hands over my ears and holler real loud, "I CAN"T HEAR YOU!". It signals that one has a condition outside of the norm and calls for somebody to handle a specially troublesome case that requires years of additional medical training because it is complex and...life-threatening. If cancer is hell and a root canal is purgatory, then therapy by a specialist is a treatment performed by Josef Mengele and reserved for the Hitlers who go there.
I could sense panic setting in. I hesitated. But just then, the pain from my jaw fired down my right arm. I was actually losing strength on the right side. I seized the phone like I had been bitten by a black mamba and punched out the specialist's number like lightning. I screamed into the phone that I wanted in there NOW! Nonchalantly the secretary mumbled, "Late afternoon." She apparently had seen a lot of dental midgets turn into dental marines when the flames of hell were licking up their jaws and down their appendages. Just let me say that when the hour of my appointment arrived, I was prepared to drive my car into the front window of the office. I stomped in there with authority. I wasn't going to take any crap about waiting for my turn. I was there for business RIGHT NOW, and I expected the doors to fly open and be ushered immediately into the arms of sweet relief. For the first time in my life, I looked upon a dentist's face as if beholding the Apostle Paul.
Had a patient been in my dental chair when I got in there, I would have picked him up and thrown him through the glass. I was under condemnation. Regardless, by the time I had hit the front door, I was doing one-liners like Rodney Dangerfield at the Purple Onion and rattling off clever comebacks like the world's fastest talking man all at the same time. The dentist and the nurses were laughing their heads off, and the victims lined up behind me like cattle were cackling nervously. The dental dwarfs behind me would take all the comic relief they could stand. I jumped into the chair like it was my first time at Disneyland and I was about to take a ride on Space Mountain. The angel before me told me to open my mouth so he could check to see which tooth was the culprit. Believe it or not, the moron took what looked like a tool punch out of a Craftsman tool box and set it on each tooth while he took a little HAMMER! and tapped his way down the line from tooth to tooth. It was an odd feeling and not something I would recommend, but when he got to the one that opened the door to hell and slammed down on it, I lunged forward as if I had been hit with voltage from Florida's Old Sparky.
My back arched and formed an "O" with the lounge chair beneath me. He had found the trouble-maker, and as far as I was concerned, it was time to end this misery and go to work. But no. This fool wanted to test his findings with a backup. If I had known then what I know now, I would have vaulted from that chair and crashed through the table and tools and straight-armed both this moron and his assistant while making my own door out of that place. I was praying that this guy could come up with a more humane way to test his theory than something like that hammer and punch when he pulls out a wax birthday candle, a HOT WAX birthday candle. That looked innocent enough. What harm could he do with warm wax after slinging away with that hammer? I opened my pie hole, and he merely laid the hot wax from the candle on the tooth that had indicated it was the highway to hell.
I have always been fascinated with astronomy. I once had a telescope that would penetrate far into space to see things there not seen by the naked eye, but when this idiot touched that tooth with that hot wax, I beheld the entire universe and every star in it. My scream was immediate, and this bonehead screamed out the two words that almost precipitated my first stroke: "ROOT CANAL!!" I nearly passed out beneath the load of it all. All of the Johnny Carson shows flashed before me like Cinerama. Again, an after-shock effect of the hot wax discharged another jolt of brimstone up the side of my head and down my right arm. All fear dissolved instantly. Even if anesthesia had never been invented, I would have begged him to help me strap on the seat belt and give me the handle bars.
It was over within an hour. And it was painless. Totally painless. With instant relief. I kissed him, addressed him as "Sir", and pumped his right hand like it was a cistern. It was the easiest dental procedure I have ever had in my life. I would go down there every day if dentistry was that easy. I want to tell you that if you are Wally Cox when it comes to the dentist and you are facing a root canal, you can go in there as if surrounded by the Alien, King Kong, a coven of witches, the Wolf Man, and an army of vampires all rolled into one and be as if you are the Invisible Man. You have NOTHING to fear. Last night my wife told me to either shut up, or slow down and stop talking so fast, and to knock it off with all the Henny Youngman wisecracks. You see, this afternoon I have to go have my teeth cleaned.