you know what really, truly sucks?

not knowing that something can possibly leave you in paralytic fear and you don’t know it until you’re stuck in a fucking chair in the middle of it.

I will freely admit to being terrified of needles. and bees and wasps. fuck that shit. I don’t care if you think it’s stupid. everyone’s got something that creeps them right out down to their core. and if you don,t well la de fucking da, aren’t you special.

what sucks more is when you find that one of these fears extends into something else.

like dental work.

see? people laugh at the needles and bees thing, but mention dental work and you’re guaranteed to give someone the jibblies.

today I had to go sit in the part of the dentist office I’d never been in before because one tooth decided to get a goddamn cavity for the first time ever.

let’s begin with the fact that this requires the dentist sticking a needle in my face. literally. if you’ve never seen me react to one going in my arm or leg, well, up the ante some.

I told them this when I went for a cleaning at the start of the month. I took them up on the offer of nitrous.

lots and lots of nitrous.

as in they had to turn it up three times.

I don’t know if you’ve ever had to use a sedative, but it takes a lot for you to still feel that sense of panic through them if you’re really dosed up.

and yes, I know nitrous is not a sedative. but having been through that before after popping one, and then two tabs of ativan so I could get inoculations before going to Bangladesh… it sucks. there’s no way around it.

so they turned up the nitrous three times. they kept asking me if I felt anything. honestly, I never really felt it until the drill started up. and that was probably 20 or 30 minutes after starting to breathe it. the dentist’s assistance joked that she’d get me high if it was the last thing they did. if that’s the case, that was a shitty high. how would I know?

gee, lemme think.

 throughout the whole process I was thinking, “why is it called laughing gas? this isn’t funny and I’m not laughing.” the fucked up thing was that I felt like it was keeping me very awake.

that stuff might numb your body, but I didn’t think it did much for the fact that I KNEW he was sticking a fucking syringe in my mouth. should have brought a stress ball. pretty sure there are clawing marks in my legs. apparently I was hyperventilating. with nitrous on. not as fun as some people think it might be.

I talked to my parents about it last night, and they kept telling me it’d be over and I’d be fine. yes, I was, but all of that advice flies out the window when you’re in the middle of it.

I never really knew it would take that much conscious effort to open my mouth to let them get started. then the shit they put in the there to isolate the tooth made me feel like they’d jacked my jaw open. and you want to scream and yell but you’re scared shitless that if you move something in your mouth with crack or go wrong so all you can do is suffer through it and let your body twitch in fear and try not to feel like you’re choking and try to remember to breathe through your nose so that dry, orange smelling gas might do something to calm you down even just a bit.

it’s like being in one of those fucked up scenes from X-Files where someone’s strapped down and you get the character POV and all they see is masks, tubes and hear buzzing and high pitched whirring and you can feel pressure and vibrating and you start to lose track of all feeling of time and it just seems to drag on and fucking on.

some people have no problem with all of this.

apparently, I’m not one of them.

when the drill started I think the gas kicked in a bit and everything just went numb. but like I said, that doesn’t stop your brain from trying to force up just sheer instances of panic. the shitty thing is that you can’t do anything about it except try and force it to go away in your head. that is not easy.

I had to sit in the waiting room after it was done for about a half hour just shaking. whole body shaking. there was some old dude in there watching me sit there shaking. then some mom brought her daughter in because her filling had cracked or something and the kid was watching me sit there and shake. she didn’t look like she had a problem with any of it. good on her. she might have been 9. I envied her for not looking like she gave a shit that they were going to tick several sharp objects in her mouth.

you know what’s a good way to make sure someone uses proper oral hygiene? put them through this once. just once.because they will never want to go back and go through that again.

I know tomorrow I’ll go in to work and my coworkers will razz me about it. that’s fine. I can shoot back. I know other people will fire some zingers about it my way too. that’s fine. because someday, all of them will end up in a situation where they feel them same.

now… where’s my fucking floss…