It used to be a yearly rite of passage, one that got you out of school (sometimes) and one that everyone endured as they grew up.

The trip to the dentist.

Between my experiences in the chair and what my daughter went through today, I believe she’s going to have a little easier time going and getting checked up than I did. Even for a small spot filling on a very small cavity spot, she survived it with little trama and pain. I, however, remember all too fondly of my pain and torture at the hands of the jawsmith.

I went to the dentist at a time in the 1980s when you were given two mouthpieces filled with fluoride paste, usually with the taste of bubblegum or grape, and were told to sit there for 15 minutes or so to let it soak in. Every time I was given this moderate torture device, I puked – a combination of the mouthpieces triggering an overzealous gag reflex and the nasty taste of the paste sliding down my throat. Every time, blech… puke, paste and saliva running down the bib and shirt. Sometimes the dental hygenist or assistant would calmly help me out and find a different way to do it or I’d get Nurse Ratchette, who’d wipe me down and shove two fresh paste-filled mouthpieces back into my piehole. It is a wonder I didn’t get a complex from it.

Another time came when a new dentist tried to pull an extra tooth out of the front of my mouth – and broke the root off. That meant a trip to the oral surgeon, who put me under and surgically removed the root and cleaned out some other anomalies in the bottom of my mouth. Not so bad – except for the fact that neither I nor my parents told the oral surgeon that I sleepwalk. Under heavy sedation, I was lead to a room to sleep and recover. I ended up walking in on two other surgeries and nearly caused grave injury to one of the patients in the chair. The other one was a friend of mine, who was getting some work done and was out, luckly. I was 13.

Wisdom teeth: I had four of them removed at the same time, with enough Novocaine in my jaw to keep me from successfully closing my mouth for hours. Pulled in the morning, off to work for 12 hours of lifeguarding to help pay for school afterward. Yeah. Never again. I was pretty much useless. Fortunately, I was the manager, so I delegated the work and I sat in the shack to collect the money. No one drowned or was hurt on that day, because the threat of a lawsuit would have really put a bright red bow on the painful day.

There are others, but I may have to hypnotize myself to get through the mental blocks I’ve placed in front of them. Today, I don’t have any problems with going to the dentist. And that’s fortunate.

Which leads me to my daughter, who told the dentist halfway through the filling filling that she liked him a lot and he was very nice. She’s 4. I couldn’t be more proud of her. I owe her one ice cream as a reward. And the best thing about the morning, more than her bravery in the chair – no mouthpiece fluoride treatments to be found. Very nice.