Can You Divorce Your Dentist?

First of all, I must tell you that I did not choose my dentist. It was an arranged hand-to-mouth relationship. My old dentist retired and sold his practice and list of patients to another practice.
What followed was a courtship of post cards announcing the transfer of my files and phone number to the new dentist. It was fairly easy. I consented but I did not choose. There was never even one of those patient-to-patient referrals wherein one employee of a company cries out to his colleagues for a dentist.

I went to the new dentist with an open mind. She seemed earnest, quiet and sincere. She was new school. No astringent formula shellacked on the gums to tighten them--that was stinging but ineffective. No, she used probes and took measurements of periodontal recession. She was a thoroughly modern "mouth" dentist who believes that oral health is more than a good bite or white smile--it's the entire environment of the mouth that must be cared for. Before my dentist came along I did not know that your teeth could fall out without one cavity or abscess; simply because the gums supporting them were diseased.

I must giver her her due. But in the first few visits, other problems surfaced, of a personal nature. I hated the Jerry Seinfeld poster in her waiting room, in which he lectures about how important a clean mouth is to him since he is always using it. Then I openly voiced my resentment that she was making me wait even though I was taking off from work. She also had her issues with me. She did not appreciate the fact that I boasted that my deep pockets (recesses between the tooth and the gum caused by bacterial erosion) were shallower than my wife's, that my gums were in better shape. She probably took a dislike for me at that time, seeing me as the brash, nasty boy who always tried to make women look bad. From that time on, I discerned a cold formality in her manner. She moved her probes roughly in my mouth, drawing blood, and not even asking me to spit out. She also spared no opportunity to tell me that the back of my teeth were stained and that I could be flossing more or better. And most unkindly of all, she did not give a parting gift of a tooth brush or cute little floss dispenser.

The only time that my dentist has smiled was after she told me that my gums were in good shape. I told her that I had taken a special seminar in flossing techniques sponsored by
J&J. She believed me, too.

Other than that, seeing my dentist has been the same kind of torture as a visit to my in-laws. I have to see her, I don't see her often, and there is no really not much we need to say to one another. Yet, it is painful. When I see her, I am reminded that one other person in the world hates me and there is nothing I can do about it, and no time to find out what to do. My dentist wears a mask when she works on my teeth. This I can understand. She needs protection from the potentially toxic fumes from my mouth. But she wears her mask when she greets me at the door. That is a clear sign that she does not like me.

You're probably asking yourself why I don't bother to change dentists. It is a good question. Like many ordeals, when the visit is over, I am relieved and grateful. "That wasn't so bad," I lie to myself. At any rate, I won't have to do it again for a while. The fact that I see my dentist so seldom, and that my teeth are in good shape, means I am never sufficiently motivated to go out of my way to find a new dentist.

There is another, more affirmative reason for our ongoing relationship, a bond between us, one shining moment in which she earned my gratitude, a more valuable bauble that it would seem. A few years ago, while I was eating hot and sour soup on the marshy river bank in downtown Westport, CT I suddenly felt a hole where my molar had been. At first I thought it was just something stuck between the teeth. I ran miles of floss through the area. But my tongue finally reported the unthinkable. A big chip of my molar had simply floated down my throat on a river of hot and sour soup. (The real cause for this was a crack in the molar which I had made by obtusely biting on a turkey wing during a Thanksgiving celebration some months before).

For months I did nothing. Then, in August I bit down on a healthy pistachio in Ben & Jerry's bright-tasting pistachio ice cream. This time I felt the shards of molar on my tongue and the enlarged space where my molar had been. But now, I had no dental coverage. The cost of capping that tooth was a thousand dollars. I needed to wait until January of the following year to treat this. When I saw my dentist she gave me two options--crown the tooth or she would fill it in with fast-drying cement, in effect sculpting me a new tooth. The second option cost under $300, the first, over a thousand. But the second option was less invasive. Crowns can hurt or fit poorly and they require destruction of the tooth that still remains. Whereas a sculpted cement tooth would just become part of the tooth. "I can't guarantee how long it will last," she warned me with her usual pessimism.

I took my chance and I still marvel at the work she did. Despite herself, she is an artist, although she will never admit it.

So my relationship with my dentist plods along every six months to a year like a very bad marriage in which there is mutual enmity but not enough to prompt an inconvenient separation.
She asks me if I want x-rays. I tell her, "No." They cost $100 extra and they pump damaging radiation into my head. So she tells me in her suffering deadpan that she can't diagnose what she can't see, with the tacit threat that if anything is going on inside my mouth that she cannot see, it's too bad for me. How I hate her for saying this time and again, in exactly the same weary, withering, guilt-inducing tone.

How I wish that she would actually do something to provoke me! But no.

My last visit to the dentist was a revelation. Just as I thought she could not hate me more I found myself in the care of her dental hygienist. This was one of the oldest psych-outs in the book: when I arrived I dreaded seeing my dentist, but due to her maneuver, she had me feeling slighted that I wasn't seeing her. But her Russian hygienist was a very worthy surrogate. She was serious, with intense eyes and the determination of a Nobel scientist. The Russian hygienist focused on my mouth as if it were a fascinating ancient text. She probed and polished it with dour precision like an archaeologist handling rare artifacts . She seemed to be doing more than just cleaning my teeth. She was scraping and poking at my gums. So I asked her coyly if she was taking over for the dentist. She replied that dental hygienists now are called upon to do a little bit of everything. So I thought, my dentist hates me but something good has come of it. She has put me in the care of this conscientious Russian hygienist and because I am seeing the hygienist my bill will be lower.

After forty-five minutes of rigorous mouth-care, the hygienist left the room and in lumbered my estranged dentist with her grim eyes over her surgical mask. She leaned over me, scanned my teeth, asked if I wanted x-rays, answered my predictable no with her standard rejoinder that she could not diagnose what she could not see, and announced that my teeth looked fine.

"Any medical issues since you were last here, any problems, and sensitivities? No? You're good to go."

For that she charged me an extra $100. So she was able to snub me, show her hatred, to spend as little time with me as possible, and to make as much money as she possibly could on a patient who uses her services as little as possible. I was doubly insulted--that she was unwilling to give me her full time as a dentist, yet scammed me into paying the full price. It as if she was mocking me, "You don't want to see me but I don't want to see you either, but I'm going to make you pay through the nose anyway."

Of course, she could really make it count by subjecting me to a gratuitous tooth pulling or some rough gum cleaning. But she is middle-class enough not to want to wreck her reputation on a minor irritant such as myself. I probably should take action soon to find a new dentist. It probably isn't healthy to continue seeing a dentist who has it in for me. Shouldn't one's professional/ patient relationships be mutually supportive, cheerful, civil at the very least?
But a voice tells me that liking my dentist, or her liking me, is irrelevant. All that matters is that she is professional and conscientious and that I take good care of my teeth.

While I sort this out...do you know a good dentist?