"And That's The Tooth!"

I went to the dentist the other day.

Like the average Korean, dentists love to kill themselves.
That is, so the story goes.
I'm not sure whether or not North America collectively read this statistic somewhere and filed it away.
Or if we all just heard it on The Whole Nine Yards and assumed it to be true.
It probably is true.
I think that everyone has a natural urge to believe whatever Matthew Perry says.
It's a disposition of his, isn't it?
Matt LeBlanc did softcore TV before Friends. 
It's true.
I personally watched an episode of Red Shoe Diaries that had him playing a sexy man in a vest.
I swear.
Anyway, I don't know what dentists have to be so suicidal about.
Decent pay, sexy assistants and wonderful teeth, for starters.
Those are perks. Those are job perks.
Since it's a profession-based suicide number, people assume that dentists are killing themselves because they hate being dentists.
I'm not willing to buy it.
There are far worse jobs.
Why don't we constantly hear about janitors blowing their brains out mid-mopping?
The stigma with dentists, of course, is that they're miserable because people hate to visit them.
Everyone fears them.
They never have good news.
This doesn't do it for me either.
All medical practitioners have to deliver bad news from time to time.
All of them are feared by some people.
Telling a man he has pancreatic cancer seems like more of a downer than telling the same man he has a pair of cavities.

I chose the dentist I chose because I sold his assistant a car.
Made sense at the time. Dental assistant. I need a dentist. I'm new in town.
Prone to not thinking things through, I didn't really think it through.
It's sort of uncomfortable.
I didn't expect her to be right in there with me.
Wrong about that.
She affixed my bib  and worked the suction.
She put plastic thingies in my mouth for my X-rays.
I had to bite down on them and, prudish as I am, they were hitting my gag reflexer.
So, I was gagging and urging as she was doing this, and she was asking me to please bite down.
I was being sexy because gagging is sexy now.
And I didn't want to be sexy in front of some woman I sold a car to.
So I learned, anyway.
For those of you who are still reading solely for my results, I have cavities.
Not sure how many.
Enough.
Enough to have a vague idea of the actual number, which suggests that I have enough.
Also, one of my teeth is fucked, which I knew before going.
I just wasn't sure how fucked.
The answer, as it turns out, is "all the way."
Might have to yank it.
But, even if it must be so.
Even if I fidget in my chair and track a tear or two down my cheek, I still don't think that's reason for my dentist to go home and 
stick his head in his oven.