Open Wide... Wider
This is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Lionel Hildes. He was our family dentist when I was a kid, and he and his wife were also close friends of my parents, so I assumed he had to be one of the best. He was a nice man, but a visit to Lionel always meant intense pain, lots of it. Fillings were the worst, and this was BF (Before Flouride) so there was lots of them. He'd drill away, then put enough metal clamps and things in my mouth to scaffold the Empire State Building, pack in all those awful cotton wads, all the while asking me questions that required essay answers rather than a simple yes or no.
"How's school going?"
"Mmmphfwk rrt skgcht."
"No kidding. What's your favorite subject and why?"
"Ah yghht smph sftjkhyt.... OWWWW," and so on.
It's when I had instilled in me a deep understanding of why we have vowels. Eventually, after several decades when I didn't go to a dentist at all (if Lionel was one of the best, I figured, the rest were all on the downside of the slope) I found my way to Sara, my present dentist, who has a deep aversion to causing pain. And she absolutely loves her profession. Sounds like a paradox, right? But Sara is the World's Greatest Dentist. Only thing is, I can't show her this cartoon because she'd be deeply hurt.
posted by John M Crowther @ 7:53 AM
7 Comments:
G-r-e-a-t cartoon John!
...can't let the opportunity pass tho to make a comment. Dentists (and dental authorities) have got a lot to answer for (IMO) to those of our generation who have been poked prodded jabbed and wrenched at, packed with toxic heavy metals, painted with persistent hazardous chemicals, and then sent out into the world to get on with it. The evidence that so many are now sick (and dying) because of what our dentists did to us is slowly coming out...and the horrors of mercury amalgam coupled with osteonecrosis of the jaw caused by botched incomplete extractions (and the impacts this condition has on general health) along with the tragedy of fluorosis, will go down in history as a travesty...alongside those other great cover-ups of the 20th century...cigarette smoking, DDT, and asbestos to name a few. The hazards, all known about long ago, have been swept under the carpet for hopefully long enough for the authorities to bury the evidence (that's us btw)...and absolve the guilt of those who knew all along but didn't disclose it.
Ooops...steps down from soapbox - exits stage left - LOL Have a great day all...:-)
This one is so funny, John C.
Thanks, Lee.
Terrific comment, Jean. One of the important functions of humor is to capture our attention so that the truth can be told!
Remembrances of Dentists Past. My father had a friend, Dr. Rose, who knowing how much my sisters and I dreaded visiting him, kept us in the chair for hours and hours and hours without the aid of anesthetic. (I would have called him a sadist had I known what the world meant.) Years later reading the biography of our Greenwich Village neighbor, Dawn Powell, I learned that her son was institutionalized the same asylum as the son of our family dentist. (I chose to draw my own conclusions.)
Because of this initial truma, I too avoided another dental visit for decades and decades until a friend spoke to me about Dr. Murray Glick of Beverly Hills. Sitting in his chair for the first time I noticed an unusual painting on the wall –not the usual floral arrangement or view of the Grand Canal designed to calm the nervous system-- but what looked to me like an oil painting of considerable value. When I asked the good doctor about it, Glick said: “David Hockney’s a patient of mine. Growing up poor in England his parents never had the money to fix his teeth so he vowed that the moment he made some money he’d go to see a dentist. He was so happy with what I did for him he gave me this one as a present.”
Here’s to all the painless patient dentists in the world who fill us with Novocain even before they clean out teeth. May we shower them with presents!
P.S. Spellcheck must have been to your dentist and is extracting vowels. It is "initial trauma" not "truma." "Truma" is the guy in the band who beats the skins in the rhtyhm section.
LOL. Then drummer must mean even more drum than anyone else. Sara the Dentist has a painting of mine in her office. Could this perhaps lead to something big?
All I can say is 'thank heavens, il professore is back.' The two of you keep me laughing all day!
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