The patient bites back
If you are anything like me, then you are an adult with severe distrust and general antipathy reserved for the American Dental Association. It’s nothing personal; I just find them to be a smug collection of odontophiles dead set on torturing innocent civilians one enamel at a time. Well, if you ask me, the suffering has gone on long enough. It’s time to recoup the power, one brush at a time.
1) Schedule Your Appointments for the Morning after a Big Holiday
December 26, July 5…uhm…whatever day comes after Easter this year: the idea is to catch your hot-shot tooth noodler at their most hungover, which just so happens to be when they are the most susceptible to my horribly stinky coffee breath.
2) Drink All the Coffee
Even if it’s not your cup o’ tea (don’t know how it could be, as I clearly specified “coffee”), chug down a pot or two of the most acrid brew you can get your hands on riiiight before your appointment. It may taste like pure worm dirt on the way down, but the look of putrid disgust on your dental physician’s face as they snoop around your throat cave will be well worth it.
3) Insist upon Standing
Look, the only people who can legally tell you to sit down are justices and commencement orators. I’ll be damned if some Colgate-wielding tyrant thinks they can control when I do and don’t recline, just because it’s “easier” and “safer.” If teeth were intended to be low to the ground, they’d grow out of the sacrum, and that’s just logic.
4) Hum a Ton of Theme Songs
Or something similarly catchy. Be it the theme song to Cheers, The Brady Bunch or—hell—even a deeper cut like that to Stargate Atlantis, repetition of these cultural cornerstones are sure to torment your dentist’s subconscious for the remainder of their day. Added bonus here: theme songs featuring funky baselines — like the theme song to Shaft — act as a double-edged sword, loosening phlegm tucked away in the deep pockets of your esophagus.
5) Never Release from the Saliva Vacuum
I don’t know the technical name for the device they use when it’s time to rinse, but you know, it’s the tool that sucks all traces of fluid from your mouth and makes your head feel like an empty Capri Sun packet. Anyway, if you just vice-grip your lips around that bad boy for however long you physically can, I’m sure it would really peeve your dentista to no end. We’ll open our mouths when we goddamn well please; we’re adults with agency over our own jaws, thank you very much.
6) Tell Them You Dream of Eating Fingers
The sooner you establish your capacity to chomp, the more control you have. Feel free to list other interesting anecdotes, like how human teeth can snap digits as easily as a carrot. It may not even hold true, but that which is necessary is not always true (Malcolm in the Middle, probably).
7) Eat a Family-Size Bag of Dots™ Every Day for Two Months Straight
Excessive? Maybe. But the degree to which we have grown desensitized to strangers shoving their fingers into our mouths is undoubtedly excessive. In this day and age, one of the only ways to protect our precious canines is to coat them with a generous buffer of gummified sugar.
8) Show Up to Your Appointment Dressed as a Dentist
They say dress for the job you want. Well, I’m saying dress for the job you want to want to destroy. Maybe, just maybe, your outfit will confuse your dentist and bring the confrontation to a stalemate.
9) Enroll in a Dental-Surgery Doctorate Program
Knowledge is power, and at the end of the day, earning a DDS is the most realistic way to accomplish what we have all wanted for so long: ridding our society of our nation’s hegemonically abusive dental system. As Sun Tzu said, “If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained, you will also suffer a defeat.” I’m sure he was talking about some healer trying to stab his gums with archaic dentistry tools.
10) Graduate with Honors
Haha, nice. Now you can rub it in the face of your old dentist, who struggled to earn B’s.
11) Become President of the American Dental Association
This is going to take time, dedication and a lifetime of sacrifices, but progress isn’t always easy. Once you run the ADA, no one will be able to tell you that you need to eat less sweets. And flossing? A mere afterthought in the wake of your empirical ascension to topple the entire system from the root up.
12) Deregulate All Guidelines for Dental Care, Ensuring Oral Anarchy for All
LOL, imagine the look on your dentist’s face when they learn that their livelihood has been rendered obsolete and their entire career reduced to shambles of its former promise. I think we can all agree they had it coming, though — after all, no one likes going to the dentist!
