May 28, 2009

On the wall

You can spend a lot of time thinking about random stuff when you’re in the dentist chair and you’re trying not to think about the fact that the someone is poking at your sensitive gums with sharp instruments. As I gazed about the sterile room, trying to keep my eyes away from a ridiculously bright light leftover from the last Inquisition, I noticed a small, square, foil-wrapped object taped to the otherwise blank and empty wall.

When the dentist finally put aside her drill and pulled all the weird cotton crap from my mouth, I asked her the question I’d been wondering for the last fifteen minutes. “Why do you have a condom taped to your wall?”

Her assistant, who had been quietly arranging a tray of sterile instruments, looked up, startled, and said nothing.

The dentist, who is a woman about my age, laughed. “I guess it does look like a condom.”

Then she shrugged. “Well, it gets boring here when patients cancel their appointments. We gotta find something to do.”

Her assistant gave her a horrified glance and continued putting dental instruments into neat rows. Later, when they were done working on me and I could stand up to leave, I looked at the square little package closer. The label said “CPR face shield.”

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Now, that's a dentist worth visiting. I am coincidentally heading off to see mine: Viet Nam vet, ultraconservative ... probably not gonna be any jokes like that.

Perhaps I will look for another.

YourFireAnt said...

You mean you don't have condoms stuck to the walls of YOUR office?? What kind of an English teacher are you?!

FA

Anonymous said...

I'm terrified of going to the dentist (I had an anasthetic run out half way through root canal work once). I'm not sure if one with a sense of humour would make it better or worse!

Unknown said...

ha ha. ha!

Teri said...

i'm off to my dentist too. they have a tv attached to the chair...for the record, that's worse.