Sunday, January 06, 2013

You don't floss enough

So Every time I go to the dentist, I am assigned a butcher who will spend a few minutes drilling blood out of my gums with those metal sticks (sorry, in my layman ignorance, I don't know what they are called), then proceed to bury a floss line in between my teeth as if she was flossing her mother-in-law's *** (my apologies to the nice mother-in-laws out there, including my own - I am just perpetuating the age-old idea that m-i-ls are evil entities per se).
Anyway, after bleeding me to the point in which I might have to go for a blood transfusion, the butcher announces from the height of her hygienist  degree that the reason why I bled so much is that I didn't floss enough.
And I obviously felt guilt and shame, because I knew better than not to floss.
Six months ago though, I had it with the butchering of my gums. I decided I would floss every single day and, I would like to see the hygienist tell me again that I bleed bc I don't floss, even though she was the one poking me with an iron toothpick and and strangulating me with a white line.
That's what I did. I might have skipped 5 out of 180 days. Those 5 days were due to arriving home at 2 am after a New Years party, or spending the night in an airplane/airport/shuttle mess - in other words, situations in which the whole regular body hygiene gets overlooked by obvious reasons of complete exhaustion.
So I get to the dentist after flossing religiously every single day (with the exceptions above mentioned), and she decides it's time to do the poking thing - that in which they poke you and then call out numbers at random for another person to write. I had a couple of 4's and 5's, which she said very categorically were due to lack of flossing.
Then I charged with the line I had been waiting six months to use: "But I floss every day."
Quick silence.
"Well, those where in the back teeth, it's normal that it happens in the back teeth."
Then she proceeded to to do that which they call cleaning - and which I call "bleeding me into oblivion with an iron toothpick"
I bled like there was no tomorrow. She then buried that floss inside my gums - nothing out of the ordinary. And I left the dentist feeling pretty banged up, wondering whether I had been hit my a Mack truck or by a 747.
My conclusion - I could have spent those 6 months without flossing and I would have heard the same crap and suffered the same amount of pain - just that I would not have gone through the daily suffering and the of flossing.

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