Open wide - and rinse, please!

Medical science and technology is getting more and more advanced. It's hard to keep up with progress. In my obsessive-compulsive planning and organization of our move from England to Dubai, even with all the fancy Excel spreadsheets I made to remember all the "must do before...." - somehow the "must have teeth cleaned before moving" slipped off the radar.

Enduring the high pitched whine of the cleaning drill and the poking around with a sharp steel instrument is not the kind of adventure I seek often. Mind you, I do my 6 month visits dilligently so I can avoid dentures at 50, but in the moving nightmare, finding a dentist and making an appointment was not a priority, yet.

Last week I did make an appointment and got Kate- the best hygenist, so I had been told by the Danish receptionist (she pointed out that she too was Danish, after reading my registration records) quite nosy if you ask me! The dentist office is a regular UN with international staff!

Tuesday afternoon I settled into the chair - the kind that always makes you feel like you slide down backwards and all the blood collects in your head! All seemed normal up to that point. Kate yapped away in her Polish accent, behind her facemask, and stuffed mirrors and sucking tubes into my mouth. When she got to the polishing part, I got alarmed because the sound was not that of a dull, slow-moving drillbit, nor was the taste of the toothpaste minty! More like Vanilla-Honeysuckle !! She put safety glasses on my face - that was when my heart started beating faster. Why would I need safety glasses? What could possibly fly out of my mouth that would end up in my eyes? Kate patiently explained that they now use a super high powered water jet to cleanse and polish the teeth and get stains off. "It tends to get water everywhere", she said. Images of something resembling Aric's industrial power washer and a jack hammer entered my mind but I faithfully closed my eyes since Kate assured there would be no pain: "It will just feel a bit cold".

10 seconds later she peeled me off the ceiling! A bit cold!!?? Biting into tin-foil would have given me pleasure in comparison! Thank God this ordeal only happens every 6 months. I can do without new technologically advanced dental equioment in the future. After paying the equivalent to $100 (gas may be cheap here but doctors aren't!) I drove home with teeth shining like something out of a Colgate commercial. All said and done I suppose it isn't worse than childbirth.