I look up to my right at an elderly man dressed in blue medical scrubs. He’s over six feet tall, but stooped posture puts him at five-nine. His long nose and lanky frame remind me of those dipping drinking birds found in novelty toy stores. I shake his hand, which is large, but soft; a good sign, I think. Dr Pace is my new periodontist.
He pulls on a pair of latex gloves and crabs toward me on a rolling stool. Up close, his face is splintered with broken capillaries, but his breath is inoffensive. A standard surgical mask hangs limply around his neck. He hands me a pair of safety goggles that look like something you’d wear operating a drill press.
"Keeps the spittle out of your eyes," he says, as he angles the retina-piercing overhead Klieg light directly into those eyes. "Okay, let’s have a look."
I’ve just endured twenty minutes of scraping and polishing by the hygienist who’s now poised to my left over a gleaming fresh tray of sterilized torture devices. I swallow hard, purging from my mouth a salivary infusion of cherry-flavored toothpaste crystals and blood. Hemmed-in, fully reclined, and temporarily blind, I open wide.
Dr Pace hooks his index fingers between my lips and gums pulling outward to widen his viewing field.
"I’m surprised," he says, raising his eyes toward the hygienist, "not too much blood."
I detect disappointment, as if "not too much blood" is not blood enough.
Before I can say I swallowed it all, the hygienist passes Dr Pace a miniature mirror followed by a metal pick much like the one used to extract hard-to-reach pieces of meat from a boiled lobster. He plunges in, grinding away with industrious fervor. In an effort to distract myself from the emery-boarding in my mouth, I attempt to identify the tipping point in dental history that made scrubs, gloves, masks and goggles necessary. I feel I’m close to the answer - tip-of-my-tongue close - when Dr Pace suddenly withdraws the implements.
"How often do you brush?" he asks.
"Three times a day," I say proudly, as my jaw resets.
"That’s too much. Go ahead and rinse."
Dr Pace neglects to return the chair to the upright position forcing me to perform an inverted sit-up to access the rinsing station. I’m wondering how I failed the brushing question when I begin sliding backward on the chair’s plastic liner. Gargling hastily, I eject the contents into the irrigated spittoon and reel in a cob web of drool with my roach-clipped paper towel necklace.
Dr Pace is waiting for me as I settle back relocating the sweet-spot in the head cradle.
"You only need to brush twice a day," he says, shedding his gloves and mask. "We’re gonna schedule some deep scaling."
Dr Pace has a habit of abruptly changing the course of a conversation, and I figure it’s a ploy to distract patients into authorizing invasive procedures. Deep scaling sounds like an oral cave-diving expedition, one with casualties, and he springs it on me immediately after shattering the
myth of brushing after every meal.
"What’s deep scaling?" I ask.
"We do one quadrant at a time."
We? Quadrants?
"We give you local anesthetic, then scale and plane the teeth below the gum line."
Scaling and planing.
As Dr Pace leaves the room, I find myself thinking there’s something else in play here. Something other than oral hygiene. Something that stimulates bleeding.
In the reception area, the lipsticked woman behind the counter produces an estimate:
Deep Scaling - $1200
"$300 per quadrant," she says, as if parceling-out the out-of-pocket expense makes it seem more affordable. I suspect she’s in on it, too.
Dr Pace is nowhere in sight; perhaps tucked away in his coffin ‘til nightfall.
Back in the safety of my car, I realize I’ve committed to pay over a thousand dollars to have my mouth subdivided into quadrants so that Dr Pace, and who knows how many of his colleagues, can excavate my gums like a colony of vampire bats. I also realize that I can still taste blood. But, for now at least, not too much blood...
