Dentafluorydrillaphobia

I hate dentists. 

Hate them.

Not them personally, just everything they do; 

Their office and the overwhelming smell of all things dental;

The fluoride they make me swish;

The high pitched scream of the drills taunting me while I wait in the waiting room:

"Cariiiiiiiisssssaaaaa!! Yooouuu'rrrrreee neeeeeext!"

I look up and make panicked eye contact with the lady on the other side of the room who is trying in vain to read a magazine and ignore me. 

"Did you hear that?" I ask clasping my neck and spinning around towards the sound of the drill. "It's calling my name. It's calling for my blood!"

The woman narrows her eyebrows and turns her body slightly away from me while I curl up in the fetal position and rock back and forth in my chair. I have to fight off sucking my thumb and looking completely absurd.

I don't know why but I have had a lifelong phobia of dentists. Maybe it's because no matter how hard I tried every time I went into the dentist office I always walked out with another appointment for another procedure. As a child I had 8 cavities. I can't count the hours I spent in that dentist chair cringing and white-knuckling the arms when I should have been out riding a bike or scraping my knee or something truly conducive to a kids' life. While in high school I got braces and dealt with the pain of monthly rubber band changes, not to mention the pain of knowing that I was awkward enough during the first 2 years of high school without the braces helping me out in that department. 

But now, NOW, as a 29 year old adult woman I am facing the worst thing imaginable. It's worse than giving natural childbirth. It's worse than when I had to have a cyst removed from my tailbone and the anesthetics didn't take so I felt the lancing, the suctioning, the packing, everything. It's that bad...

I have to have a....*gulp*

Root canal!! (spoken by a deep echoing man's voice which sounds much like Don LaFontaine).

Dun, dun, dun!

I broke a tooth in the back of my mouth about 6 months ago and it wasn't giving me any trouble until yesterday. Now, every time I eat, drink, or swallow my mouth lights up like an electric fence. It's like eating a lemon that's been hard-wired for someone on death row. My mouth screws up into one big twisted pucker, my eyes twitch and shift on my face trying to slide off passed my ears, one eyebrow is narrowed and the other has receded into my hairline. 

I have NEVER had to have a root canal! I have no idea what to expect. People have told me that it's not so bad. "Not so bad"...why does that still not comfort me?

I'll just opt for the conscious sedation. I don't care what it costs. As long as I can walk in there and walk out and not have any memory of it, I. don't. care. 

You know, they really need that conscious sedation for things like middle school and certain dreaded social events.