Dentists - Bah humbug!

I read Jinksy's account of visits to the dentist and how she could see no reason to regard these visits with trepidation. She was lucky she got anesthesia for dental work! When I was a kid, going to the dentist meant a visit every six months or so. At those times the dentist would poke around in my mouth, murmuring tsk,tsk! There was never less than five cavities, often more. Before you say ,"I know why you had all those cavities! Too much sugar and chocolate!" funny that's what the dentist would say too. But hear me out. I grew up on a farm - lots of fruits, vegetables, home-grown beef, pork, and chicken as well as our own milk and little or no candy bars. How then, you say? Genetics. My parents had poor teeth as did their parents, so they took great care to see that I ate well and visited that miserable old (at least I thought he was) dentist every six months. Seems that I was blessed with very soft enamel, hence the large number of cavities. But I digress.
I will explain why my experiences were so very different. Cavity filling meant being jabbed with a huge, long needle to freeze the gum and nerve. If that wasn't bad enough, there was the vibrating drill grinding away at the cavity, while I froze to the chair, praying that drill wouldn't slip. No water-cooled drills then! This continued through my childhood and teenage years. When I married, we often didn't have enough money for essentials for our babies, much less to fix teeth!
At one point during one of my pregnancies, I could stand the pain no longer, so I went to a dentist. He examined my teeth and shook his head. 'You need some work done here', he said, 'but right away there are two teeth that are ulcerated and must come out today.' I reluctantly agreed. He proceeded with that dreaded big needle. It hadn't gotten any smaller or less painful since I'd last been to a dentist either! Soon he came back to, as he put it', see if they were ready.' Obediently I opened my mouth. I knew the freezing hadn't set in, but thought he's just checking - right? Wrong! he immediately latched on to one of those teeth and yanked it out sans freezing while I'm trying to tell, him, around the implements in my mouth that I'm not ready yet. When I asked him what he thought he was doing, pulling my teeth with no freezing, he very matter-of-factly said, 'Oh well I knew the freezing wouldn't help for an ulcerated tooth, but I wanted to make you feel better. Besides I knew you'd probably panic if I told you the truth.' And you wonder why I avoided the dentist! At age thirty, I finally had my poor soft teeth pulled and was fitted with dentures. This was the one and only time I ever had an anesthetic to have any dental work done! I have not regretted the decision to have those troublesome teeth pulled. I haven't kept up with the latest and best in dental technology - for obvious reasons. But believe me, I sympathize with any of you folks out there who dread those visits!