My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places

You Know the Drill

My husband goes to a dentist who has a TV mounted on the wall beside the chair. Ed comes home talking about the new way of preparing smelts that he saw on the Food Network while the dentist scraped tartar off his incisors. Now, thanks to Ed, I associate seafood dishes with plaque removal, and hardly ever request tartar sauce anymore.

I went to my own dentist this week, after a hiatus of some centuries, and was excited to see that Dr. Chee had installed a TV set too. An infomercial was on, all about porcelain veneers and whitening procedures and other wonderful things that your dental insurance doesn’t cover. From observing dozens of Before and After shots, I concluded that women are much better at applying makeup after they get veneers.

The hygienist was draping me with a lead bib, in case some of the X-rays dribbled onto my chest. I asked her if we could change the TV channel. She explained that it was not a TV but rather a VCR for showing videos about Dr. Chee’s new services.

Like any successful businessman, Dr. Chee is not one to pass up a revenue-generating opportunity. This is a dentist who hands out free sugar cookies in his waiting room. Dr. Chee is never all that happy to see me, because I never let him replace my fillings. If my teeth don’t hurt, I’m not messing with them.

“So,” said Dr. Chee. “What brings you here? Need a new toothbrush?”

Dr. Chee told me to watch the video monitor while he poked around in my mouth. On the screen was a closeup of some revolting discolored molars. I waited to see how the porcelain veneer folks were going to tackle this mess.

“These are your teeth.” Dr. Chee had been holding a tiny closed-circuit TV camera inside my mouth. He panned from one molar to the next, narrating in the grave, somber tones of a newscaster at the aftermath of a major natural disaster. “Pitted, corroded fillings. Cracks and fissures where the amalgam has pulled away…”

He could have said, “Look how nicely these fillings are holding up!” and the images—to my dentally ignorant eye—would have fit. In fact, I’d made the rounds of several other dentists in town, hoping to find one who’d say, “Look how nicely these fillings are holding up!” But they didn’t, so I went back to Dr. Chee, where at least you get cookies.

Dr. Chee said that I needed to replace fillings in three teeth and get crowns on two others. He said that a crown costs $850. I have heard of crowns costing this kind of money, but these are mostly in the Tower of London. To distract me from the bad news, he panned artfully to a medium closeup of the roof of my mouth, which he described as a “high, steep vault.”

“That’s where I keep the gold bullion I’ll be using to pay for my dental work,” I said. Unfortunately, Dr. Chee had his hand in my mouth, as well as the hand of his lovely assistant and a Bissell dual-suction upright rug-cleaning system and another hand and a 93-piece cordless drill set and the Pensacola University Marching Band.

Consequently my witticism came out this way: “Aast aaa aah caaa aga ah ah at ah ah aaa-aa a caa-ah a ent-ull uh.” Over the years, Dr. Chee has developed a remarkable ability to understand the garbled, consonant-deprived utterances of the orally overloaded. “Ha, ha,” he replied.

Then I gave him my usual if-it-ain’t-broke line. He turned to the hygienist. “Make a note in the chart: Hold off on replacing fillings until patient’s teeth rot in mouth.”

He sounded displeased. He sounded like he wanted to send me on a short walk off a long pier with a lead bib.

“Okay, maybe one crown. Will I be better at applying makeup after the procedure?”

Dr. Chee smiled. He’s a nice guy, and he doesn’t deserve patients like me. If I were him, I’d have put my fist in my mouth a long time ago, and not to fix three fillings.