This was bound to happen sooner or later:

I had to pick some things up from Costco, the wholesale bulk quantity store which has a location in Workland. I had just put 3 huge packs of drumsticks and a meat-lover’s pizza into my cart and was scanning the rest of the shopping list that The Girl had written down for me on white and pink girly paper–I think it has hearts and lipsticks and shit like that on it. As you can probably guess I was trying to be discrete. It’s bad enough walking around in scrubs with a shopping list on girly paper, but I just know that there have to be people in the store that I’ve worked on over the years who recognize me, but whom I would have no idea about (unless you put a rubber dam and sunglasses on them and show me their xrays). In fact I do know that I’ve seen one of the employees of the store for a consultation. She I remember because I look for her every time I go so that I can avoid her.

On top of all of that, my scrub bottoms were slowly working their way off me because I had my heavy key ring in the back pocket and gravity had proceeded to work against me. The only other pocket was my breast pocket and it had my new phone in it. I didn’t want to stop in the middle of an aisle, undo the knot on the waist tie, and then retie the trousers. The washrooms were at the far opposite end of the store and I figured I’d be done with my list by the time I made it back to that end of the store anyway.

“Hi, Docka!” I hear from somewhere to my left.

I look up and see a Chinese woman smiling at me.

“Uh, Hi!” I say with an embarrassed smile of nonrecognition.

She keeps looking and smiling at me. It feels like a slow clock is ticking in my head as she seems to not realize that no amount of her looking at me will jog my memory.

Finally she says with a moderate accent, “You don’t recognize me, huh?”

“Um. Did I work…on you?”

“You saw my son for his tooth,” she says pointing at her lower left molar area.

“Oh! How’s he doing?” I ask, trying to buy conversational time so that I can gain more context.

“Oh, he’s ok, he’s in grade 8 now, you know. He has other tooth problem. I have tooth problem too, but not for you.”

“Ah. So when did I see your son?”

“Musta been about 2 year ago.”

“Oh,” I say

“Uh huh, 2 year I think.”

“Well you know, I don’t even remember what I did last weekend,” I say.

She doesn’t laugh. Instead she looks in my shopping cart and says, “Eww!”

What now? I think as I look at her disgusted face that is almost positioned inside my shopping cart. I think I can feel my pants starting to drop some more but I’m definitely not going to pull them up now.

“Dat’s a lot of meat! I’m vegetarian.”

I laugh, “Oh, yeah, my wife likes meat, she’s from Romania.”

She looks at me blankly.

“She’s European.”

“Oh so what is…is she..?” she says as she pulls at the skin on her left forearm.

“She’s white.”

“Ah. I see,” she says and then pauses for a bit before she continues, “So any babies?”

And so it went on for the next 5 minutes until I was able to extricate myself. It’s a good thing I didn’t have Kissaki’s tampons in my cart. Or that might have started a whole other conversation.

Is it just me or do you guys find that the fuck up factor is magnified significantly when you’re working on friends or family?

And even if you don’t screw anything up, the procedure inches towards the (negatively) unlikely outcome.

“…so because the insides of the roots of your tooth are infected, you need to have root canal treatment if you want to try to retain the tooth,” I say.

“Uh huh.”

“The success of treatment in your case is 85 to 90%.”

“I see.”

“The alternative is to extract the tooth.”

His eyes seem to light up, “I should talk to my dentist about that?”

“Yeah, if that’s an option that you need more information about.”

He pauses for a moment, “My naturopath said that if I need a root canal, I should have the tooth extracted instead. What’s your take on that?”

This time I pause for a moment, “If I sat down with your naturopath and discussed your root canal situation, we would never agree. Naturopaths base their conception about root canals on decades-old information that is now out of date.”

He’s paying attention.

I continue, “They feel that every tooth that has a root canal maintains a high level of bacterial content. These bacteria escape the tooth and travel to other parts of the body and cause problems there.”

He starts nodding slowly.

“But if you think about the fact that your tooth is already infected and the signs of infection are localized to the area surrounding the tooth and don’t appear to have caused a problem in your leg or anywhere else, why should a tooth that has a failed root canal treatment be any different. In any case, the degree of sepsis within teeth after properly done endodontic treatment is not what your naturopath would have you believe. You do need to remember that those odds of success I gave you account for relapse, and the odds are pretty good for a positive outcome,” I say.

He nods faster, “And I suppose that if root canals didn’t work, you wouldn’t be in business.”

Fuckin’ ignorance, I’m thinking about the naturopath.

“That’s exactly right. Anyway, I’m not going to argue with your naturopath’s recommendations. You need to trust one of us more than the other, and that will help you to decide how you want to go.”

And so he leaves the office to think about things for a bit…

A few years ago when I was working elsewhere, I was referred a patient from Public Health. He turned out to be a really nice guy who was having thermal hypersensitivity on most of his teeth, but especially on his upper anteriors.

Examination of the teeth found them intact, no caries or defective restorations, but something looked odd about them. They had a dullness to them and they also looked too smooth across their facial surfaces. These were teeth without veneers so the problem wasn’t unaesthetic restorations. Could it be developmental?

He saw that I was checking these teeth out and with a proud smile asked, “Do you like how clean they are?”

“…yeah, I do,” I said uneasily. I had a feeling something was coming that I wouldn’t want to hear.

“Me too. I’ve been using a Dremel.”

“To do what?” I asked trying to buy time so that he wouldn’t say what I knew he was going to.

“I put this paste on the teeth, not sure if it’s aluminum oxide paste — but you use it on cars to polish the finish — and then I use the Dremel. Works just as good as your dental spinny gizmo, don’t you think?”

Here‘s a post about a dental visit that cracked me up.