No more metal

This morning I was back at the dentist office despite getting a clean bill of health a couple weeks ago.  At that visit the dentist recommended we finally go about replacing the last silver filling in my mouth.  I have had my other numerous childhood silver fillings replaced with composite by my dentist down here.  She is great, she does everything she can to make an unpleasant experience as getting your teeth drilled not bad at all.  She even numbed my gum with a gel before injecting the Novocaine so I didn’t even feel that part.  She even provided me with a headset so I could listen to music instead of the sound of the drill.  Really the only unpleasant thing you have to deal with is the smells of burning tooth and the rubber lip afterward from the numbing solution.  I was in and out of there within a half hour.

It’s such a contrast to how I viewed the dentist when I was younger , I was absolutely terrified of the place.  I had tons of cavities as a kid due to poor brushing habits.  My childhood dentist was not a big fan of pain management.  In fact many times he would suggest I don’t need any novocaine because the cavity was “small”.  Of course the few times I took his suggestion it felt like he was drilling a hole straight through to my brain.

I had a constant dentist countdown running in my head at all times.  It was like waiting for your father to get home to give you a spanking for doing something bad.  I had that sort of anxiety about it.  Thankfully my dental visits got progressively better as I got older, once I realized that if I didn’t want the pain, hassle or expense of extensive dental work I needed to change my ways.