...would be an eternal dentist appointment.

I have a pathological fear of dentists. The way they surround you with complicated machines that make strange, ominous noises. The way they stick foreign objects in your mouth without preamble. The way they don't offer a word of explanation as they pour chemicals into your mouth. The sterile, artificial... everything that surrounds you - walls of gray and an insincere shade of sea green, everything so horribly clean-looking, clean-tasting, clean-smelling. The way they stick latexy appendages in your mouth. The way they do what they can to "make you feel comfortable," while at the same time making you about as uncomfortable as a human can be and making a mockery of themselves. The way they grope around, finding things wrong with you that you didn't know about and never bothered you and probably never would have, had they not told you how grave and expensive they were. (And the "laughing gas" did not make me laugh. It made me paranoid and was among the worst experiences of my life, haunting me for several days afterward.) Plus they're the only profession with the power to make a healthy adult drool uncontrollably. I'm sure they are very nice people, but I hate them anyway.

Discuss.

I don't really mind the dentist. Then again I have no fillings :D

The vaccum thing isnt all that great neither is the scaler thing which I have to have done pretty much every time as I have overcrowding in my bottom teeth.

Going to the dentist can be fun if you put yourself in the right mindset.

i do believe he refers to the nitrous.

I hadn't been to the dentist for a few years and, in that time, managed to get cavities in between my teeth.  I have two more fillings left to get in two separate appointments (having gotten one on Thursday).


What chemicals do they put in there that you wouldn't know what they are?  The only thing I've had them put in there is that nasty sandpaper toothpaste, fluoride, and two kinds of anesthetic (the topical to numb before they stick the needle in with the local).  The dentist has always told me what it was he was doing.  Except for that damn needle I'm pretty comfortable.  The tools and sounds don't bother me but I guess the smell kind of does.  Dentist offices always smell funny.  Different from a hospital smell, but there's a little similarity there.  I don't think you can perfectly comfortable, especially when getting a filling, mostly because you have to have so many things shoved in your mouth.  I always ask for the mouth prop so I don't have to hold my jaw open.  The most uncomfortable part of my last filling was this metal thing that got screwed onto the tooth after the drilling.  I'm not entirely sure what it was for, but I guess it was a mount for the amalgam and that little welding torch thing they used.  I'll ask tomorrow when I go back.  I'll have a good two minutes to get questions answered while he waits for the local anesthetic to fully kick in.

If you haven't figured it out, I'm afraid of needles, so I do understand that kind of fear.

Boo. They're fixing your teeth - put up with it.

Alright, that's perhaps a bit strict, but, "horribly" clean-looking, clean-tasting? There is a reason for that, surely? :P

I agree with Jabber. The dentists' place is a place of horror. I had braces from I was ten untill I was eighteen, during which time I had to visit their horrible castle every other week. I never was scared when I was there, but always the day before and the way over there had my stommach stressed out, and I always seemed to want to fall asleep in the waiting room. I seriously believe they spray some kind of sleeping gas in them hallways to keep people from going insane with terror or something. As soon as I've been there for a few minutes my mind gets dull and I just wanna get home and get some sleep.

Also, I don't like how you're there to be critizised, how they put their fingers inside your mouth, how they drill in your teeth, poke around with needles and treat you like a bag of potatoes rather than a human being. And one of my dentists had dandruff in his chest hair :'(

It's either that or lovely rotting teeth  ;D

Or brushing them regularly, that seems to work for me.

1) Hahaha.

2) Yeah, that's something I forgot about that definitely bothered me.

By the way, folks, I'm seriously, paralyzingly afraid of medical procedures, so my hatred has extended to things that possibly don't merit it, like all the antisepticness of such places.
Yeah, I hadn't been in like two years; I went in yesterday, and (surprise!) not a single cavity. I've never had a cavity... but the worst two days of my life (two teeth per day) were when I had to get caps on four of my molars whose enamels didn't form properly. Getting your teeth drilled is seriously like being in hell, except for the anaesthetic. Dental operations are psychological torture; I often felt as though I was feeling pain, even though I wasn't, just because I had no idea what they were doing in there. And the smell of drilled teeth... that's something I'll never forget.

Maybe one day I'll write a complete chronicle of those two operations, so that everyone who reads it can be afraid of dentists too.

And I wasn't joking about the laughing gas. That's the closest I've ever come to hallucinating, and (fortunately, I guess) it cured me of the impulse to ever use anything hallucinogenic again. I hate the feeling of not being in my own head.