My dentist is a sadistic fuck. Seriously. I have never feared the dentist, and I’ve always taken good care of my teeth. Well, I should credit my mom for the majority of that, she had us in for our yearly cleanings and flouride treatments like clockwork. And I have the genetic good-fortune of freaky-strong tooth enamel too.

But as most good things must come to an end, so did my 35-year cavity-free streak. It actually ended a year ago, so I guess it was a 34 year streak, but whatever. When I had my dental check-up the x-ray showed my first cavity, which I promptly blew off for the next 12 (or 18) months. Time sure does fly when you’re avoiding the dentist! Not to mention that I was deep into my active drug abuse during a lot of that time. I probably only scheduled the original dentist visit because I was looking for some way to score…

Fast forward to this week, when I’m trying to move forward with doing all that life-maintenance stuff that I neglected while I was strung out. I called the dentist, sheepishly admitting that I’d been in a while before but never came back to have my cavity filled. Imagine my suprise when they welcomed me back with open arms! Little did I know I was walking straight into the embrace of a man who was holding a drill in one hand, a sharpened hook in the other.

Like I said, I’m not scared of “the dentist” in a general way, but I’m definitely afraid of my dentist. You see, I, being a broke-college-student-recovering-addict, am on medicaid. In my state, the dental care one gets with medicaid leaves something to be desired. Most dentists don’t take medicaid, and the ones that do are a little scary. My last dentist was competent and not entirely ungentle, but the x-ray machine at her clinic was so old and rickety that the dental assistant had me holding it steady for her while she escaped from the room to push the button. Otherwise it would have drifted off to the side and taken a picture of my inner ear, I suppose. But that gem of a place went under, and so I was driven into the lair of Dr. Yea.

During the first visit I had relatively little interaction with Dr. Y, so I hadn’t really formed an opinion of him yet. I figured he was ok, and my husband, J, needed to see a dentist too so I made an appoinment for him earlier in the week. I should have known something was deeply wrong when J came home from his appointment with Dr. Y and wouldn’t speak to me. But I figured he was just upset about his impending root canal and blithely ignored the warning signs.

The morning of my appointment I brushed and flossed and headed out. The dental assistant took a few x-rays and put some topical numbing stuff on my gums so I wouldn’t feel the lidocaine shot that Dr. Y was to administer. Finally the man came over to assess my mouth. After the standard lecture about not drinking soda and brushing and flossing every day, he got down to business. Not only did I have the cavity that I’d learned about on my last visit, I had another, worse one that needed immediate attention. He also wanted to put some seals on the chewing surfaces of my molars.

He slapped a pair of safety glasses on my head, whipped out a big-ass needle and said something about a “little poke.” He then proceeded to jab that thing into my gums on the other side of my mouth from where his assistant had put the topical anesthetic. Ouch! But not too bad. The drilling and filling and sealing wasn’t all that bad, really. The worst thing about all of that was that my throat kept closing when I tried to breathe through my nose, and I couldn’t really breathe through my mouth because, well, dentist.

Whew, this isn’t so awful, I thought to myself as gritty bits of my tooth flew about the room like pixie dust. A little while later, Dr Y was telling me to bite down, the fillings were done, and…it was time to clean my teeth.

Suddenly the dentist seemed to be in an extrordinary hurry. It’s like we were in the olympic qualifying heat for timed tooth-scraping. I always hate the part where they scale your teeth with that damn hook, but this guy took the cake. He was gouging my gums left and right with that torture device, and then he had the nerve to lecture me because my gums were “sensitive and bleeding.” Yeah, buddy, I think most people’s gums will bleed if you stick a sharp, metal hook in em.

My god. I was gripping the arms of the chair so tight I broke a nail. My heart started pounding and all I could do was focus on trying not to choke to death on the water they were spraying in my mouth. When he was doing the last two teeth, the front lower two, I know I was wincing. He noticed, but instead of stopping or asking what was wrong, he grabbed my lower lip and pinched it between his thumb and forefinger really fucking hard – I guess that was to distract me from the meathook action he was perpetrating with his other hand.

Then he was done and my head was spinning. His assistant polished my teeth and told me to visit the restroom to “clean up” on my way out. I looked into the mirror and saw my mouth ringed with blood and spit, a blotch of greyish amalgam material on my lower lip. I smiled and noticed the dark spots of blood on my gums where he had stuck me with his hook. I washed my face, collected my free toothbrush and split.

Back at home I told J that I didn’t like our dentist. I said I couldn’t see why anyone who had real dental insurance would go to a doctor as rough as he was. J turned his sad, blue eyes to me and said: Yeah, that guy’s a butcher. I don’t like him. I felt so bad for having sent J to this guy, since he has total PTSD issues from bad dental experiences. But we had a bonding moment discussing the sadistic asshole, during which I waxed hyperbolic about the parallels between dental care and waterboarding, and then I went into the kitchen and loaded up on ibuprophen.

All day long my mouth throbbed. It’s fine now, and I know that there are dental procedures that are far, far worse than anything I went through. But still, this was a routine filling of a small cavity and a cleaning. There shouldn’t have been any pain or panic involved in this situation. This dentist, Dr. Yea, obviously makes his profit by hurrying patients through as quickly as possible – he examined my teeth, filled two cavities, put sealant on my molars, and did my cleaning in under 40 minutes – but he should keep in mind that the mouth is exquisitely sensitive and that patients feel intensely vulnerable when they’re in his chair.

I’m thinking about writing a letter to him and his assistant. What do you think, should I?