If a street punk informed me that he would be removing my teeth, I would gallop my way to safety, feet pounding and arms flailing.
But a visit to my dentist poses no such threats. His job is to preserve and protect my pearly white crown-encased teeth. He has every inch of my mouth mapped, memorized and x-rayed. He knows my mouth better than I do. If a lunar rover were small enough, he could remotely land it between molars number 19 and 30.
He is a spelunker of sorts, exploring regions that I myself cannot see. I rely on him to do that task. He refers to tooth numbers like familiar addresses that he casually visits every six months, reporting their status to me like a barber shares the local gossip with his clients.
Sitting in a dental chair provides us time to think. Despite being in the presence of a small audience, we are not expected to say a word.
There’s time to think….
There’s a special relationship of trust we share with those who have more intimate knowledge of specific parts of our body than we, ourselves, do. They are witnesses of our inner workings and maintenance requirements. Still, it’s unnerving when medically-licensed spelunkers travel into the hidden reaches of our bodies that we will never be able to see with our own eyes.
I never met my adenoids—and never knew of their existence—until I was ruthlessly assaulted by a barrage of infections that made swallowing a fearful event of searing pain. As a child living in Germany, doctors whose language I could not understand told me my adenoids had grown defective through massive and repeated bacterial attacks. I was hospitalized and put to sleep; the offending organs were harvested by entering my nasal passage with cold stainless steel implements. That was my first experience with medical spelunking, the practice in which a physician explores parts of the body which are invisible to me.
Later, other physicians would pull, poke and examine other parts of me that I had never seen. “How’d you get that scar?” one doctor asked, pointing to the lower region of my back.
“Uh, it’s nothing, I don’t think,” I pondered, his question catching me off-guard.
Finally I recalled what he was referring to. Decades earlier, my back had skidded across the bottom of a too-shallow landing-pool at the end of a steep slide ride at a water park, reddening the water and my swimming suit with pink blood. I had never grown personally acquainted with the wound except by gyrating wildly using a three-mirror setup in my bathroom. Even with that arrangement, I could only view the reflection of the wound. My physician, however, trumped me. He, unlike me, was an eyewitness to the medical history permanently etched upon my spine.
Some explorations are far more intimate. At my annual general physical exam, my doctor reserves the prostate exam ritual for the grand finale. Like a pitcher winding up for the third called strike, he extends his arm high into the air and outstretches his fingers. The end of the windup: he pulls the rubber glove on with his free hand and releases it. The rubber glove snaps loudly as it protectively seals his hand, which he flexes to ensure a secure fit.
He asks me to prepare myself. Then he strikes, quick as a serpent.
“Ugh!” I groan. That’s the worst part of the physical exam! I hate that!”
He masterfully pops off the rubber glove. “I get that a lot,” he responds impassively. “It’s no picnic for me, either!”
There are, apparently, some spelunking destinations nobody really wants to visit. I will trust his report to enlighten me concerning this region of my body that he knows far better than I.
Suddenly I return to reality. I am back in the dental chair. The two faces stare down into my gaping mouth, which by now is developing stretch marks. But all is bliss; compared with my recollections of other medical experiences, today’s dental provocation seems minor: the sting of the needle entering my moist unsuspecting cheek, the drool forming droplets and descending my numbed lower lip, the artillery of the drill destroying my ten-year-old twelve-hundred-dollar-after-insurance dental bridge, long past its useful life.
I stare down the blinding lights that have the illuminating intensity of construction zone flares. A sense of warm satisfaction blankets me like the heavy dental x-ray resistant shield that often lies across my lap; I recognize that, during the past 20 years that I’ve been a faithful client of this dental enterprise, my dental repairs have funded the purchase of the hyper-electronic double-thrust orbital magneto drill that is now chewing up my teeth.
No wonder I feel connected.
Let the spelunking continue.
I deserve it.