Doctors and dentists
Pat Fule
Fule for Thought
I recently went to the dentist. Yeah, I know, you’re probably saying, “big deal!”
It is a big deal to me, as I am pretty afraid of dentists. Well, not necessarily the dentist, but the pain I expect. I mean, if I had my way, there’d be “sedation dentistry” for a check-up and cleaning! That would be the best. You walk in, they give you a pill (or the gas … love the gas!). As kids in Canmore, we all had a dentist we feared. Just the name of the guy would strike fear in our hearts. I saw kids screaming, crying, and being dragged into his torture chamber, and one of those kids was me!
The drive to Banff on “appointment day” was the worst. It was the fastest drive ever, it felt like my dad was speeding! I had no time to talk him out of it, or beg him out of it (I always thought my dad went to the old Mount Royal Hotel when I was at the dentist … he seemed pretty happy when I got in the car)!
The dentist never believed a kid when he said he could still feel everything, and he’d just keep on drilling, and cutting, and grinding … I hated that guy!
It wasn’t until I was 18 when I could tell my dad I was never going back to the Crazy Man! I was able to switch to a new dentist, who I happened to play with on a Canmore fastball team. I think I may have mentioned him in an earlier column, but when he extracted my wisdom teeth, I can honestly say it was the best time I’ve ever had at the dentist. The freezing wasn’t working, so he put me on the nitrous oxide mask. He had to see another patient, and said “I’ll be right back, Pat.”
To me, that meant I had no time to spare. I began breathing in and out as fast as I could! I sounded like a steam train, but I wasn’t going to quit, until he was pulling off that mask! I decided I’d get as much gas as I could, because I remembered he said one of the wisdom teeth had to be broken to come out! So … when he said “right back,” I believed him! God bless that screaming kid in the next room, because my dentist pal came back about 20 minutes later! By then, I was absolutely “gunned.”
I was drooling, giggling, and basically one happy mess! He could have taken the teeth out with a brick, and I wouldn’t have cared! Needless to say, I have no recollection of the whole procedure, and that’s when it hit me! Why hadn’t Crazy Dentist ever used that stuff on us kids? I don’t care if we were minors, that had to be better than his “Concentration Camp” techniques!
Recently, I went to my new “doc.” He seems like a good guy, a bit skinny for my liking, but, oh well. After the usual “exercise more” rah rah stuff, he asked if everything else was alright. I asked him if he could check my nose. He asked what was wrong with it. I was going to say “that’s your job,” but that would have been smart alecky, and he probably had stuff that could hurt me like Crazy Dentist! I said “I think I have a hole inside my nose … maybe through the septum?”
It’s not a word I use often, and I hoped I hadn’t said scrotum by mistake! New Doc began to laugh (by the way, a guy never wants a doctor to laugh at him in the examining room)!
“Mr. Fule, you don’t have a hole in your septum, that’s very rare … I’ve never even seen one!”
“Well Doc, I already have a lisp when I use the letter “s” and now when I breathe in, I whistle! The students are laughing, and I sound like a tea pot,” I replied.
He said resignedly that he’d check it out and inserted (that word scares me!) his device up my nose.
“Holy crap, Big Guy, you have a hole in your septum!”
Huh, I thought … top of your class? He went to the computer and began feverishly typing. I quietly whistled away. He said he’d get me a referral to an ENT specialist and it probably meant surgery. I replied that I was starting to like the whistle, it added character, but that didn’t seem to work! Then he asked if I’d ever been hit repeatedly in the nose? Head maybe, nose, no! He looked stumped and then asked me something I never saw coming.
“Mr. Fule, I have to ask this question. Do you do cocaine?”
I looked at him and thought, ‘does this body look like I do cocaine? Aren’t they all skinny? You just told me to trim down, is this a new Jenny Craig Plan?’
“No, Doc, I don’t do cocaine. I’ve done Dristan Spray, but not cocaine.”
He looked at me puzzled … I sure hope he believed me!
(“Fule for Thought” is a slice of life humourous column that appears in the Strathmore Times, written by long-time resident, town councillor, high school teacher, coach, husband and father of two – Pat Fule. If you would like to get in touch with Pat, you can send him an e-mail at Pat.fule@shaw.ca)