The Dentist

"No! No!" The groans burst from the back seat of the mini van. "We hate the dentist, why do we even have to go? We brush our teeth – our teeth are fine!" they protest.

"Going to the dentist is a privilege," I lecture, my eyes on the road. "You're lucky that you have someone to take care of your teeth. Plus, you shouldn't complain. Your dentist is like a trip to the park compared to the dentist I saw as a kid," I add.

This gets their attention. "Why? What was wrong with your dentist?" asks Noah, concerned.

My dentist's office was tucked into the first floor of a ramshackle two-story house. I would sit in the dark-paneled waiting room, absently paging through Highlights magazine, dreading the moment the receptionist called my name.

Tucked into the reclining chair, pallid green paper napkin clipped around my neck, Dr. Mallard would lean in, big belly pressed against my arm, cigarette dangling between his lips.

That's right. My dentist smoked. In the office. While he cleaned my teeth. He even had a floor-stand ashtray where he'd set his smoking cigarette when he had a particularly taxing procedure, something that required two hands, like a tooth extraction.

Worse yet was the "fluoride treatment." While my kids get the "tooth vitamin," as their dentist calls it, delicately painted on each tooth with a swab, I suffered through a Styrofoam tray, always a size or two too large to fit properly in my mouth, filled to the brim with supposed bubble-gum-flavored goop.

Dr. Mallard would jam it into my mouth, tabs protruding from my stretched lips, and set the timer, while the noxious fluid dripped down the back of my throat and I wretched and gagged.

I kept my eyes on the cuckoo clock high on the wall in front of the gurgling spit sink and swish cup. Finally, at the end of those excruciating five minutes, Dr. Mallard would lean in, grab the tabs and pull the goopy mess from my mouth, leaving a trail of pink-colored spittle draped onto the napkin. Then I would lean over the spit sink, drain the water from the Dixie cup and rinse the foul fluid as the pirouetting dancers sprung out of the cuckoo clock and spun back through the engraved doors again.

My kids are transfixed in the back seat as I relay the details of my dental experiences, the look on their faces simultaneously aghast, thankful and entertained.

While I'm telling my story, though, I have another vision: images from my church's dental missions to our sister church in Honduras. A few times a year a team of dentists and assistants travel down to La Ceibita, Honduras, where they perform dental work on dozens of patients.

I'm always struck when I see those photographs of grinning children and adults, many of them missing several teeth, by how happy they seem. Joy radiates from their faces. And for what? For a tooth extraction? For a filled cavity? For a root canal?

Their joy makes sense, of course. These are people for whom dental care is a luxury, like a trip to the spa or the nail salon for us. These are people who have suffered through hours and days and weeks of excruciating pain. These are people for whom a tooth extraction, by a capable, trained professional, is a gift from God.

They are happy and grateful for procedures we dread. They are joyful about a visit to the dentist, a visit so much less comfortable than ours.

"They don't even have TVs on the ceiling," observes Noah, when I show him the Honduras photos [my kids watch Sponge Bob from televisions suspended from the ceiling as they lay in reclined chairs for their cleaning. I prefer Oprah during my visits.].

"And why is everyone holding those paddles?" he asks.

"No TVs, that's right. No TVs anywhere in their village, not just in the dentist's office," I remind Noah.

And those paddles? They are paper fans to provide a tiny bit of relief for the dentist and the patient from the stultifying heat.

It's a matter of perspective. My kids think they have it hard. I even think I've had it hard, recalling the fluoride and my cigarette-puffing dentist. But we don't. We don't have it hard at all. We are the lucky ones. And we don't even realize it.


Celebrating Global Missions Sunday at Southwood Lutheran Church. Photos by Lori Buchmann, from Heart to Honduras dental mission trip, 2010.

* A respost from the archives as I travel to Massachusetts for the funeral of my dear friend Andrea's father, Uncle Bill. Thank you for grace, prayers and the respite to love and grieve. 

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