Women with power tools and heavy equipment should wear hard hats. The assistant wielded the oral shop vac near my palate, and placed blocks between my jaws way back by my "hangy-down-thang".
Not that I have dental procedure anxiety disorder. It's more of a fear of gagging all over the dental staff. The dentist herself was treading like a military mine removal specialist.
For the first hour or so I wondered just what was the engineering/construction term for those boxy things sitting near road construction sites looking like tipped over coffee tables from an ancient giant race of gods. You've seen them, but you might not have really noticed since you didn't have blocks the size of Stonehenge boulders in your mouth when you drove by. My anxiety about gagging was being replaced by engineering vocabulary panic. My dad would be so disappointed. Dad taught me to solve square roots to make road trips go faster.
Second hour it was obviously time for a different distraction technique. Though seriously numbed and blubbery, anxiety was still lurking in my fuzzy brain. And that's when Fibonacci came to the rescue. Zero + 1 is 1. 1 + 1 is 2. 1+2 is 3. 2+3 is 5. 3+5 is 8. 5+8 is 13. 8+13 is 21. 13+21 is 34. 21+34 is 55. 34+55 is 89. It was getting increasingly difficult to hold onto the thought, but the second dental filling seemed to be going much faster than the first. 55+89 is is is, hmmm. Or was it 54? I would have to start over. This is pathetic. This is a gross, 144. Prime numbers were starting to holler in tiny munchkin voices back behind my ears. The munchkins were wearing sparkly magenta hard hats and safety vests.
"Trench box," cried the munchkins, "shoring box." 144 + 89 was interrupted. "Tap, tap, tap," said the dentist munchkin ... "Grind, grind, side to side." "$194," said the front desk woman.
© 2013-2016 Nancy L. Ruder
No comments:
Post a Comment