Pain and the art of stoicism

I swear before god that my first dentist had a setup like you see above in the corner of his office.

He didn't use it anymore, but it still managed to scare the heck out of me. Even without such a display, going to the dentist in those days was almost always painful.

His office was upstairs from the shoe store on the southwest corner of 25th and Marshall streets on Church Hill. The single pleasant aspect to going to the dentist was that, afterwards, we'd go to the shoe store downstairs and stand on a machine and look down at a screen to see a fluoroscope of our shoes and the bones in our feet. We kids thought it was great fun.

It was meant as a tool for fitting shoes, but ... what were they thinking?

They obviously weren't thinking about the X-rays bombarding our feet, that's for sure.

But I digress.

We went to the dentist upstairs from the shoe store because that's where my mom had always gone. She, too, had grown up on Church Hill. By the time I got to him, probably when I was about 6, my mom's dentist was an old man.

So was his equipment. Not as old, mind you, as the antique chair and drill he kept as a display in the corner. But old, even by late 1940s standards.

There was another downside to this elderly dentist: He didn't yet "believe" in Novocaine, which was still in its infancy in dentistry. Generations had endured the pain of his drill un-numbed. Why shouldn't the next? Pain makes you stronger.

A few years later, our church hired an organist whose husband was just starting out in dentistry. He used Novocaine. We switched to him immediately, and he was my dentist until he retired.

By this time I was all grown up and working at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. As I started casting about for a new dentist, I learned about the woman who had made the fangs for the Virginia Museum Theatre's production of "Dracula." I decided she would be my new dentist.

That didn't last long. She moved to, I think, Northern Virginia.

Again I had to find a new dentist, so I asked my periodontist - yes, I now had a periodontist -- if he would recommend a new dentist. "A woman, maybe," I suggested, ever on the lookout for a gentle touch.

"There are no good women dentists," he told me. Then he recommended Pat, who was moving back to Richmond and taking over her late father's practice. (My periodontist, who is also now retired, had a dry, stiletto-sharp sense of humor.)

Because I had an appointment with Pat today, I was reminded of that ancient dental drill from my childhood memories.

Pat uses Novocaine and 21st-century equipment. She was preparing to install a crown a few years back and asked me if I'd like an electronic back-massage pad for the chair.

I declined.

Call me a stoic.