Steve Lundeberg

Awhile ago, I wrote in this space about a certain tooth that, depending on who you talk to, has caused me a bit of trouble over the years.

Well, a couple weeks back I had occasion to visit the dentist for a teeth cleaning. Having actually read what I had written here about my badly crooked tooth, she wanted to discuss it with me and what could maybe be done about it; she even referred me to an orthodontist for a free consultation, which I will have done sometime next month.

As she and I talked, though, what really struck me for some reason was how much the whole dental experience has changed since I was first dragged, more or less terrified, to a dental office as a kid by my parents.

Our dentist in those days was a fellow named Elton Storment, and though he was actually a very nice guy, someone once removed the S from the name on his sign, leaving him to be known briefly as Dr. Torment; my sister Debby seemed to find that particularly amusing, so much so that I now wonder if was actually she who modified the sign. Deb, assuming you still read my blog every now and then, what do you have to say for yourself on the subject?

Anyway,  whereas nowadays dentists garb themselves up so much you’d think they were preparing to do brain surgery, back then the only difference, appearance-wise, between our dentist and any grown man in the waiting room was the smock the dentist always wore. There was certainly no mask or eye protection, and I don’t recall him wearing latex gloves.

Another key difference I’ve noticed between 1970s dentistry and now has to do with spitting into a sink; that is, you don’t don’t do it anymore. Instead, there’s that little vacuum cleaner attachment that you’re supposed to close your lips around so it can siphon away all of the debris-laden saliva. I really never have gotten the hang of that; always feel like a part of my mouth is going to end up torn off and hurtling through the tube.

As a kid, the four things I hated most about going to the dentist were, in no particular order, the awful-tasting (in any flavor) grit they cleaned your teeth with, the novocaine shots, the fluoride treatments (more terrible tastes, and general discomfort to boot), and the drill. I guess that meant I hated pretty much everything about the dentist, except for the X-rays, which were harmless enough until they revealed a cavity or two.

And it seemed like I had one or two pretty much every year, which sounds sort of bad until you consider my brother Craig was once diagnosed with 22.

Nothing against Dr. Storment, who I did always like, or the dentists I used while living in Klamath Falls and Springfield — well, actually, I never did care for them much — but my own dental experiences definitely took a turn for the better after we settled in the mid-valley in 1990.

That’s when I started going to my wife’s longtime family dentist, Cy Austin of Corvallis. Not only did I take an immediate personal liking to the guy, but he seemed to find way less wrong with my teeth than anyone ever had before. In the five or six years I went to Cy before he retired, I believe I had one cavity, and he filled it, at my request, sans novocain (I don’t mind shots much in general, but I really don’t like them in my mouth, and I also don’t like being  numb for hours).

When he retired, his daughter Sara took over the practice, and I chose to stick with her. It’s been a good decision, even though there was an adjustment period of sorts.

If you think sexism was necessitating the adjustment, you are wrong. By then I’d already been to a couple different women MDs, and I have never had a problem with females in any role in the workplace.

No,  mainly it was because Sara is three years younger than I am, and that forced me to recalibrate my perceptions a bit. Because before she started working on my teeth, pretty much every health care professional I’d been to had been roughly old enough to be my parent.

I guess what I had to come to grips with was, I was definitely getting older.

Oh well.

Sara, by the way, has never diagnosed a cavity in my mouth, for which I am thankful.

What I’m even more thankful for, some years back I happened to ask her hygienist if that teeth-cleaning pumice came in a non-flavored form … and much to my surprise, she said yes.

So now I don’t even mind that procedure, and of course I’m too old for fluoride treatments, so going to the dentist nowadays isn’t half bad.

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