The Only Person on Earth Who's Not Exactly Looking Forward to Spring Break

Back in February, when I last visited my dentist for a six-monthly-teeth-and-gum-scraping, I was once again told that I needed to have my one and only wisdom tooth removed. Now I could've ignored it, like I've been doing to all dental advice ever since high school. My high school dentist recommended that I have the surgery to stop gum deterioration, where they remove skin from the thigh or butt and graft it into the mouth, at the receding gum line. As a a high schooler, you can imagine my reaction was something along the lines of, "Eww, gross me out." I was horrified at the thought that someone I knew might find out I had skin from my butt plastered into my mouth. What would life be like then? Names posted on my locker, written in pen on those cheesy locker stickers that the pom squad made for the cheereleaders. Instead of "Go Sarah," it would be, "Go Butt-Mouth" or "Get 'Em Ass-Gums." I would be even more undesireable than girls who spent their weekends working on Trig homework and coming up with little math jokes to impress our teacher. But really, it wasn't the potential name-calling that made me recoil in horror, but the thought of surgery, even minor surgery. Someone cutting me up and sewing me back together. I'm cursed with a vivid imagination, only intensified by nights spent watching old sci-fi movies with my dad, so I have a lot of semi-gruesome images and scenarios that I can call up on demand.

Needless to say, I sidestepped this surgery with clever excuses, a sort of dance that has defined my life with dentists. It's a complicated pattern, sort of akin to Billy Flynn's song-and-dance routines in the musical Chicago. The dentist tell me I need this -- I tell her that it sounds great, really, but I have final exams or can't take a break from teaching or am planning to go to Vegas that weekend, but I'll schedule it next time I have a check-up. It's not a lie-lie, in the sense that I usually do have final exams or a tough teaching schedule or a trip planned, but I am technically lying in the sense that I could probably find plenty of time to squeeze in a minor outpatient surgery. It's always worked well for me as a mode of operation.

Unfortunately, as I recently discovered, my current dentist and his staff don't fall so easily. Dr. Joe is jovial, but rarely listens to what I say, so not only does he ask me where I work and who my husband is every single time I come in, but when I tell him my usual I-can't-make-it-anytime-soon-we'll-try-again-next-time, he smiles at me and tells his office manager to schedule me an appointment to get my wisdom tooth pulled. I figure that I can worm my way out of it with the office manager, but she's an elderly Brit, sort of like a gray-haired Mary Poppins, and when I told her that I didn't see being able to get it done for a while, she just looked at me, searchingly, and then said, "Well, surely, you have spring break, dear. When is it? We'll schedule a time for you then, nice and quick." It crippled my defenses completely and the "dear" only sealed my defeat. So finding myself in unfamiliar territory, I leaned in confidentially over the desk and said, "The truth is, I'm sort of scared to have the surgery."

She smiled right away and said, "Oh dear, don't you worry. We'll take very good care of you." And that's how I ended up with a wisdom tooth extraction on the first day of spring break.