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I haven’t been to a dentist or doctor in years and I don’t plan to anytime soon.
My visits to Student Health are when I accompany someone as a support system. When I’m sick, I stay home until I get better. If I have a toothache, I bear down — figuratively as bearing down for real would only make it hurt worse — and pop a couple Tylenol until the pain subsides.
It isn’t that I have anything personal against doctors and dentists. The last family doctor I had even once told me I was abnormally normal.
If I do go to a doctor, I want them to see that. “Oh, he’s abnormally normal. Well then, we’ll just give him a bunch of ice and he won’t be sick anymore.”
Just as long as I don’t get a doctor who thinks it’s funny to check my prostate by saying, “Open up and say, ‘Aaaah.’”
And dentists, well, dentists are creepy. Did you ever see “Little Shop of Horrors”? Either version, the old Roger Corman one or the musical from the 1980s? Steve Martin is the singing dentist for the 80s piece and Jack Nicholson is the over excited patient in the original.
Both are totally out of their gourds.
The dentist is a sadist, glorifying in the pain he causes. The patient takes the masochist role, ecstatic that the dentist tools aren’t quite state of the art.
On screen, it’s hilarious. In real life … not so much.
Sorry, doc, I’m OK living with some pain. I don’t go out looking for it.
There are great dentists out there who go out of their way to make patients comfortable. Maybe I’ll find one who will just gas me out and I won’t know what happened.
Then there are dentists like Luis Sanchez of Florida. He says he used to be a dentist in Cuba and a dental assistant in Florida before losing his job. Until he was pulled over for running a red light in West Palm Beach, he was still a dentist, providing care to his friends that couldn’t afford a licensed practitioner and to supplement his income until getting a new job.
What a nice guy, helping his friends like that. Except that the dental tools found in his car were rusty and spotted with blood.
Can I just say, holy jumping crap.
Granted, this isn’t anything like the urban legend of waking up in a bathtub full of ice and short a kidney, but this worries me.
I don’t avoid the dentist simply because I can’t afford it. I don’t avoid the dentist because it will hurt. I avoid the dentist because of guys like this.
I avoid doctors because I already know that the news will be bad.
Ready for the understatement of the year? I am not a health nut. I don’t exercise. I don’t count calories. If I have left over pizza, I’m not opposed to rolling over at midnight and having a bite. I eat pie with a fork right out of the pie tin.
Ice cream is a good breakfast, especially with Ovaltine.
My next trip to the dentist will be to get my dentures fitted.
When I’m 40.
I know other people need doctors and dentists and I’m glad they are there. Back when I was a little kid, there was a particular emergency room that never had to worry about business as long as I was around.
And not everyone who needs a doctor can go. Some people go too much.
That’s it. Show me a universal health care plan where certain people get cut off from plastic surgery and the money saved automatically goes into funding insurance coverage for those who can’t afford it.
That will never happen. It can’t. Too socialist.
Besides, requiring people to spend money on something that used to be elective just isn’t going to happen.
Just like insurance.
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