In Our Own Backyard....‘Bring me two pina coladas’

Talk about it

Last week I took a tropical vacation – the very day after the biggest blizzard of the year!

Given all of the snowfall of the past 10 days, it’s a little hard to decipher one big snowfall from the next, but last Wednesday’s stands out in my mind because I never made it in to work. I’m guessing I could count on one hand the number of times I’ve missed at least part of a work day due to bad weather during the 18 years I’ve been at the newspaper – and there were even fewer times when I didn’t make it in at all. Generally, once the plows come through and clear our rural roads, I jump in the car, drive to work and salvage at least part of the lost work day.

Not so last Wednesday. It seems the weather just got worse and worse as the day wore on, and I wasn’t able to get any closer to the office than the Internet.

By the time Thursday rolled around (a scheduled non-work day for me), I was more than ready to get out and blow off some steam. My husband had snowblowed the driveway for the third time, our neighbor had bladed our road with his pickup, and the county plow had, at long last, come down our road – leaving a five-foot drift of snow, packed hard as rock, across our driveway. Ken got out the snowblower for the fourth time, our neighbor rammed the drift full-force with his pickup plow, and voilà – I was off for town and my appointment at the dentist’s office.

There are certainly many other things that I would rather have been doing that day, especially after having been held captive by the weather for 24 hours, but I was glad to be out and about and I promised myself I’d go shopping after I got done at the dentist.

A little background history, here – I broke off part of a back molar several weeks ago, and during the subsequent visit to the dentist, I learned I would need a crown applied to it. At my next appointment, the hygienist gave me a shot of Novocain and after the allotted amount of time, the dentist began drilling. Normally my teeth aren’t particularly sensitive, but this time, as the dentist began to drill, I could feel it. Rather than stop everything and endure a second shot of Novocain, however, I decided to tough it out. By the time I realized I’d made a mistake, the process was too far along to go back so I somehow made it through.

At last Thursday’s visit, I was supposed to have the crown put on, but my dentist informed me that there appeared to be “something flawed” in the mold they took, and she would have to make some “adjustments.” And that, of course, meant going through much the same procedure all over again. I felt a little bit edgy, remembering my last experience.

“I’ll just let Jodi [not her real name] numb it up a little for you and then we’ll get to work,” said the dentist, deferring to the hygienist. (These days they use phrases like “numb it up” instead of the “N-word” so you don’t get so crazy when you know it’s coming).

Jodi stuck her begloved hands in my mouth and reached all the way to the back gum with her applicator to “numb it up a little.”

“This is your lucky day!” she announced. “The flavor of the day is pina colada!”

And sure enough, the topical anesthetic she dabbed on my gum tasted deliciously like pineapple and coconut!

I began to feel its soothing effect on my gum as Jodi came at me with the needle.

“You know,” I quickly interjected, “last time it didn’t really work all that well and I could feel the drill.”

She nodded knowingly and said she could certainly take care of that.

Instead of one shot, she gave me two, and as I sat back to let it take effect, I could feel not only my gum grow numb but my cheek, my lip, my left nostril, and I swear even my left ear lobe!

When the dentist came back, she gave me a pair of dark glasses to shield my eyes from the glare of the overhead light. Then she tipped me back to a prone position and I figured if I just closed my eyes, I could almost pretend I was on a beach somewhere, lying in the warm sand with the sun on my face....

“NEEEEEEEEEE-owwwwwww,” screamed the drill, and all thoughts of the beach immediately left my head.

The dentist must have thought it preferable to keep up a light banter to distract me from the drill, because when there was a break in the action, she shared, “I just got back from Cancun. It was wonderful there. All we did was eat, and sleep and lie on the beach.”

“NEEEEEEEEEEE-owwwwwwww.”

Thankfully, my jaw was too numb to feel any pain this time, but if I would have had any feeling in my face, I’m sure I would have smiled.

Because somehow, in the midst of all that drilling, lingering tantalizingly on my tonsils was the taste of pina colada...

Tags: local columns, in our own backyard