“Hey, who are you? Are you the assistant?” The patient inadvertently bit down on the mirror rather hard while speaking, but didn’t seem to notice.
“I’m the auxiliary, yes.” I said dryly.
“When do I get to see the real dentist?”
“When I’m done. I’m going to need you to stop moving your tongue around.”
Previously I had only seen children fidget so much, but this fully grown adult had the attitude and hygiene of a toddler who didn’t have their mother there to forcibly brush their teeth. Her’s were coated in the thickest layer of microbial plaque I had ever bore witness to in my four years experience as a dental hygienist, or anything I could think of having seen in dental school. It looked as though they could have resulted only from an entire lifetime of not so much as touching a tube of toothpaste- a life this woman was too young to have had. The gingivae, upon closer examination, were oozing some kind of horrible, black secretion I could only think to be a punishment from God for years and years of oral neglect. To top it all off, I slowly began to notice that her face was the unfortunate victim of a severe case of macrostomia, one so bad I was struck with a primal sense of horror when I removed the cotton pliers from her mouth, and she cracked the most horrible, uncanny smile I had ever seen on what I hoped was a human. Underneath the deep-seeded instinctual fear I got a little second hand embarrassment- she was very awkward. Reminded me of myself.
Disregarding the abnormal sharpness of her canines, the distance between her oral commissures were outside any normal range I had seen before, so far that they extended nearly to the zygomatic bones. After staring at me, holding the smile for an unnaturally long time as I stared in frozen horror, her demeanor suddenly wilted and she sighed- breathing directly onto my face. My surgical mask could not protect me from the horrible scent of rotting blood and viscera assaulting my olfactory sensory neurons.
“I was trying to be nice. You’re supposed to smile at people when they smile at you.”
She said, slightly annoyed.
I stumbled back and turned raggedly to the sink, emesis occurring just in time for me to pull down my mask.
“I have to say, I’m pretty dissatisfied so far,” The woman said prudently while I heaved over the sink.
“You’ve got to have a strong stomach with this sort of job, right? And you’ve been a little short with me. You’re too young to be going around with a big head, thinking-“ I drowned out the woman’s psychotic ramblings with the sink, rinsing the bile from my chin. When I turned it off she was craning her neck to the side, shouting at me.
“Just who do you think you are? I make enough money to buy this entire property on one week’s salary!” She spat, the black secretion flying across the room.
The angrier she got, the more the labiodental purgatory she was creating filled my head, and more and more of the secretion bubbled up from her gums. It was like periodontitis at a million times the regular speed, her gums softening, decaying, replacing themselves with gunk in a matter of seconds. One by one, her teeth started to fall out of her mouth, some dangling on by the periodontal ligament, but all eventually falling out on the floor. She continued to yell as this happened and her words became nothing but the incomprehensible cadence of an angry, shrill sounding person.
By the end, when her mouth was nothing but a deep cavernous black hole, she stood up expectantly with her hands on her hips, likely expecting some kind of apology.
I wiped my mouth on my sleeve, and cleared my throat.
“You’re going to need dentures. I can recommend a great prosthodontist.”
The woman cried out angrily and started motioning at me. I didn’t understand, so her eyes darted around the room for a moment before she grabbed my notepad and pen out of my coat pocket. She scribbled recklessly before thrusting it back into my hands and crossing her arms, seemingly satisfied.
I’ll grow them back myself in a few days, thank you very much. You won’t be getting a cent out of me!