I went to the dentist to have my teeth cleaned, which I had always thought was one of the more…read morestraightforward transactions available in modern life. You arrive with dirty teeth. Someone cleans them. You leave with clean teeth.
There are forms, certainly. There is insurance. There is the small paper bib attached to your shirt with a chain that makes you feel like an enormous baby about to eat lobster. But underneath all of this is a reassuringly simple premise: the teeth are dirty, and then they are not.
They began with X-rays.
After that, a woman poked at my gums with a tiny metal instrument while quietly calling out numbers to another woman. Two. Three. Three. Four. Five.
I had no idea what the numbers meant, but understood instinctively that five was not good.
Eventually I was informed that I would need a "deep cleaning."
This sounded fine. I had come for a cleaning, and if they wished to clean deeply, I was prepared to admire their thoroughness.
Unfortunately, they couldn't do it today.
The receptionist, I was told, would arrange another appointment for tomorrow. This was mildly disappointing, but reasonable. Apparently my mouth required the sort of cleaning that needed to be scheduled in advance.
There was, however, one other thing.
I had a cavity.
A small one.
My insurance would cover it.
This information was delivered casually enough that I regarded it as something we were discussing for the future. Perhaps tomorrow, during the excavation.
Then someone reclined my chair.
There are moments in life when events begin moving just slightly faster than your ability to question them. A person is telling you something, another person is putting something in your mouth, and suddenly half your face has ceased participating in the conversation.
Before I had quite worked out what was happening, there was a drill.
It was remarkably quick.
It didn't hurt.
And a few minutes later I was standing at the reception desk with a newly filled tooth and the pleasant, rubbery sensation that my lower lip belonged to somebody standing several feet to my left.
This was when the receptionist explained that my insurance would not cover the deep cleaning.
It would cost thirteen hundred dollars.
I declined.
And so I walked out of the dentist's office in the peculiar position of having gone there for a cleaning, received a filling I hadn't expected, and left with precisely the same amount of uncleaned teeth I'd brought in.
On the way home, I kept running my tongue over the numb side of my mouth, checking periodically to see whether it had returned to me.
Eventually it did.
Nothing hurt. The filling felt perfectly normal. In fact, as dental experiences go, the procedure itself had been almost pleasant.
It was only the sequence of events that bothered me.
Somewhere in the space of an hour, I had entered a building asking for one thing, been told I needed a more expensive version of that thing, declined the expensive thing, and emerged having received an entirely different thing.
My teeth, meanwhile, remained patiently dirty.
Presumably they had been watching the whole operation.
They must have wondered what I was doing there.
