This will be a short post because there will be only a short wait for the dentist.

Many people dread the dentist. I used to.

It was to invite inevitable pain into one of the most vulnerable areas of your body.

Where a dentist works is only inches away from your brain. A mere slip of the drill and your face might be scarred. Like any renovation, dentists can find more problems beneath the one they saw on the x-ray.

That can mean more drilling = more pain = more inclination to stay away from the dentist all together.

It used to be said that dentists had the highest suicide rates among all professionals. I guess they didn’t much like inflicting pain any more than their patients liked putting up with it.

Modern dentistry has become sensitive to the potential fear and pain that is inherent to many procedures in their trade. There is laughing gas (nitrous oxide), and numbing creams to dull the needle’s invasion and, in a worst case scenario, general anesthetic for procedures that require a hospital stay.

Dentist offices now feel more like spas. Beautiful pictures on the ceiling. Often a TV set. Bright and cheery pillows and wall decorations designed to make you feel welcome and at ease. My dentist has floor length windows that look out on a nature preserve.

Makes the stories my parents told seem just slightly less than barbaric. Anesthetic wasn’t very good in the early days and was only used sporadically. It isn’t any wonder the fear and anxiety of byzantine dentistry practiced before the 1950s was passed down to the kids.

My mother tells of the night she needed an emergency extraction. In lieu of anesthetic, the dentist – ably assisted by my Dad – cracked open a bottle of high class booze.

It was that kind of small town where everyone knew everyone and was close and in each other’s business. Besides Dad was a lawyer. He and the dentist were both professionals I’m sure they rationalized.

The booze bottle was opened, Dad and the dentist poured themselves a stiff drink, but none for Mom when she asked. She was undergoing surgery, after all. Mom failed to see the logic and as the night and procedure wore on, the level of booze in the bottle steadily diminished.

At the end of it all, my mother’s mouth was packed with gauze, the offending tooth on the dental tray and both Dad and the dentist drunk as lords high-fiving each other over the successful procedure.

I have become so inured to the dentist’s drill, I usually refuse freezing. In my view, a couple of minutes of intense drilling wins out over a numb and skewed face and the hours it takes to come back to normal. Even the injection site hurts.

So dentistry today isn’t what dentistry once was. The importance of dental health to our overall health is much better understood. Dentistry has moved to center stage and away from the dark corners of back room barber shops.

Thank goodness. I have utterly no trepidation these days about most dental visits. The only discomfort I experience these days is the loss of time and not talking or breathing right for as long as they need me to.

That seems like a pretty sweet trade-off and impressive progress from the bad old days.

Kinda makes me want to smile.