by Don Haslett

Created on: May 17, 2009

I'm sorry that I had to leave the office without much explanation this morning but I was in some real pain and my Dentist said that she could squeeze me in if I could get to her office by noon. Now that I've had treatment I don't wish today's experience on anyone. I went in thinking that maybe I had an abscess and was dreading the thought of a possible root canal. I'm here to tell you that a root canal would have been like a walk in the park compared to what I've just been through.

In general, it was a pretty disgusting morning. I woke with a lump on my gum beneath my molar and it had grown even larger by the time I arrived in Brooklyn. As I made my early return to Manhattan it felt as if grains of sand were shifting around in my gums as I drove. I got to the dentist office and as I sat in the waiting room I could have sworn that I felt something moving around in the swollen lump, but I figured it must only be my pulse throbbing oddly in this newly sensitive spot. I sat back in the examination chair and the Dentist asked me to open wide and she reached in with a wooden tongue depressor to do an initial probe to see how things looked. She touched the dull wood to the abscess and then jerked her arm back a bit. This was a bit like hearing your surgeon say, "Oh God," right after he makes a cut...

"Is there a problem?"

She said that no, she just had a muscle spasm that gave her a little start. She told me that she needed to relieve the pressure on my gum as this abscess was bulging and pulsing like an old inner tube about to blow out.

The Dentist reached in with a small scalpel and gave a quick flick of the blade across the lump and she pulled away, her instrument dropping to the tile floor with a clang. I've never before seen such a look in the eyes of someone performing a procedure, especially one on me, but I only had a moment to think about it before I realized that the steady liquid flow I felt coming over my lip was not just a little blood and infected fluid. I snatched one of the little round dentist mirrors on a stick from the instrument tray and held it before my mouth and I could see some pus and a little blood, but I was horrified to see what looked like a mass of little baby spiders spilling from the freshly slashed lump on my gum!

It wasn't really that many, maybe several dozen, but it was so repulsive that I almost gagged. The dentist recovered from her own shock and scooped several

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