Touching a raw nerve

Having spent the past two weeks in the company of a dental surgeon in a hard hat who has been boring deep inside my oral cavity with a pneumatic drill seeking to strike gold in the bedrock, I would like to ask readers to sit back, relax and take in this blow-by-blow account of the torture:

Day 1:

While lying fully reclined with the footrest in an uptight position, I had ample time to reconstruct in my mind the entire family tree of the Romanovs. This is getting to be almost as bloody as the Russian Revolution, but Czars had it relatively painless in comparison.

Day 2:

Dentists take a mandatory semester in medical school in which they practice extracting tusks from unanaesthetised African bull elephants before they are allowed to use the same techniques on hominoid patients.

Day 3:

If I somehow don’t make it through this one, I would like to be reincarnated as a dental surgeon in my next life. Not only can you carry out archaeological digs to excavate fossilised remains of a family barbecue which, after carbon dating, are found to be the relics of an ex-goat from the winter of the year 1977 AD, you can also laugh all the way to the bank.

Day 4:

Dentistry is one of the few professions ever invented in recent human history where the torturer is actually paid handsomely to inflict pain on other human beings. The only other profession is, of course, of a Thai-style boxer masquerading as a masseur who can dislocate every ball-and-socket joint in one’s skeletal system at a highly discounted off-season rate right there on the beach at Koh Samet.

Day 5:

Today I got my first bill. The doc said I can pay in installments. Maybe I need a bank loan. There is a direct correlation between the degree of pain and the size of the bill.

Day 8:

At the risk of touching a raw nerve here among those who don’t see the humour in having their precious ivories plundered by bounty hunters disguised as dentists, let me recount a professional trade joke told to me by my own dentist. It comes from the horse’s mouth.

Q: What is the difference between a dentist and a New York Yankee baseball fan? 

A: One yanks for the roots, and other roots for the yanks.

Day 15:

Hahaha. Ouch. It hurts when you laugh. But as days go by, there is less and less to laugh about as one by one I lose my incisors, my canines and finally my felines. Soon, I will only be able to gnash my gums while worrying about the state of the nation.