Sex & the Suburbs: A blissful, nitrous-smothered trip to the dentist
May 15th, 2009 by Cooper Levey-Baker in News, Sarasota-Manatee
Ed. note: This piece, by Theresa Rose, will appear in next week’s issue of Creative Loafing.
I had my first laughing gas high this morning at the dentist’s office. ’Twas good.
Dentists and I have a love/hate relationship; they love to take my money, and I hate them with a bloody passion. I had dental trauma several years ago after getting into a serious car accident, and I have yet to get over it. Every time I set foot in that wretched, whitewashed office, my palms start to sweat, my jaw clenches and my shoulders hike up around my ears. Every second is pure torture. Even with my trusty iPod playing my favorite tunes, I still can’t shake the near-paralyzing anxiety. By the time the plastic sucky-thing is put into my mouth and I’m told to open wide, I morph into a certifiable, raving ninny.
Today was different, however, because I saw a different dentist: a female dentist. After she witnessed my total freak-out in the oh-so-comfy horizontal chair, she looked at me with compassionate eyes and said knowingly, “I think you’re a candidate for nitrous.” I didn’t know what a candidate for nitrous looked like, but I was pretty certain I resembled a petrified cat with PTSD getting its claws stuck in the ceiling tiles. I was ready to try anything to get through this nightmare without having a full-blown panic attack.
Within a few minutes, they strapped a plastic doo-hickey onto my face and instructed me to breathe through my nose. (Visions of Steve Martin in Little Shop of Horrors were dancing in my head.) After a few minutes of heavy breathing, my arms and legs started getting heavvvvvvvvvvy and I entered the coveted twilight zone for which the dentist prepared me. After a couple of quick shots of Novocaine, I was off to Happy Town, Population Me.
For the next 45 minutes, the dental hygienist pinched, poked, stabbed, scraped, sandblasted, powerwashed and vac-dried my mouth, and I didn’t give a rat’s ass. I was off offf offfff in my own fabulous world.
I’ll be honest: I had fantasies about boys during the entire procedure. Cute boys. Famous boys. Local boys. Boys I knew and boys I didn’t. Singer boys (Justin Timberlake) and actor boys (Zac Efron). Boys with big shoulders and cute butts. Boys with open hearts and soft lips. Boys. Boys. More boys. Did I mention boys?
I was blissfully swimming in a sea of testosterone when I heard my iPhone ring, temporarily pausing my Jason Mraz playlist. The ring tone pulsating in my earbuds was “You Sexy Thing” by the ’70s funk group Hot Chocolate. There is only one person special enough to earn that particular ring tone: one Mister Michael Rose, hunky husband to the fantasizing, almost-middle-aged woman currently hyped on nitrous.
It was then that I got the biggest high of all; I realized that I met and married the boy of my dreams.
Mmmmm… ’tis good indeed. When my beloved comes home to me, I intend on giving him a big smooch (and maybe a bit more) to show how much I love him. Hopefully I’ll feel my lips by then.
Theresa Rose is the award-winning author of Opening the Kimono: A Woman’s Intimate Journey Through Life’s Biggest Challenges. She is the president of Serious Mojo Publications and recipient of the 2008 Royal Palm Literary Award from the Florida Writers Association. For more information or to read Theresa’s popular blog I Got Me Some Serious Mojo, visit theresarose.net.
June 10th, 2009 at 2:50 pm
[...] note: This piece is the latest entry in Theresa Rose’s ongoing column, Sex and the Suburbs. It will appear in next week’s issue of Creative [...]