Sally Breslin: My Life: MY DENTIST NEEDED A TURKEY BASTER

Usually when people think of going to the dentist’s office, they don’t associate the visit with anything even remotely humorous. I, however, more often than not, find some reason to laugh whenever I visit my dentist, the infamous “Attila the Driller."

Such was the case the week before last, when a piece of my tooth landed on my dinner plate in the middle of my meal and I was forced to pay an unplanned visit to my dentist.

I honestly can’t remember ever making it through the entire six months between dental cleanings without having some reason to go see the dentist. Usually, right around the third month, my teeth begin suffering from dentist withdrawal and inevitably will do something sinister like grow an abscess the size of a tomato or spew out a filling, just to force me to return to the House of Pain.

At my most recent visit, I was led into a room where a repairman was tinkering with some of the equipment next to the dental chair. Needless to say, his presence didn’t exactly give me a boost of confidence.

What, I wondered, was broken that was about to be used on me? Would the drill go berserk and drill a hole all the way through my jawbone? Would the suction device suck out my tonsils?

Just as I was about to give the repairman the third degree, he left. The dental assistant then entered. She was singing, “How Can you Mend a Broken Heart?” by the Bee Gees.

“The stereo speakers don’t work in here,” she explained. “So I have to provide my own music. The other rooms have music, but not this one.”

Naturally, I thought. The room with the broken speakers and the broken equipment had my name written all over it. At least, thank goodness, the assistant had a nice singing voice.

After examining what was left of my broken tooth and uttering “Hmmm” a half-dozen times, Attila the Driller had good news. The tooth could be saved with "only" a root canal, a post, a crown and the equivalent of the national debt of a small foreign country. He began to work on the tooth.

That’s when, with my mouth filled with yucky-tasting water from the drill, I discovered what the repairman had been repairing.

The suction device...because it wouldn’t suck.

“I thought the guy fixed it?” my dentist said to the assistant when her efforts to suction my mouth resulted in a barely audible "phhhttt" sound and not even a drop of water being sucked up into the tube.

“He said he did,” she answered. She proceeded to try the device on the back of her gloved hand. It made a weak, gasping noise and then went silent. I began to think it needed a priest more than a repairman.

Meanwhile, I still had a mouthful of water and nowhere to spit it out. “Maybe you could use something like a turkey baster in the meantime?” I asked in a voice that sounded as if I were gargling.

Both the dentist and the assistant laughed.

But heck, I was serious.

Over an hour later, after I’d gone through two x-rays, a couple shots of Novocain, endless drilling, 56 more choruses of “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?” and two sets of impressions, the repairman returned.

“Aren’t you the same person who was in the chair when I was here earlier?” he asked me.

“I’m afraid so,” I said. "At the rate I'm going, I'm probably going to end up sleeping here overnight."

He turned on the suction device and it made a sound similar to that of a toilet unclogging after it’s had a plunger taken to it. Then when he tested the device, the suction was so strong, it nearly sucked the wallpaper off the walls.

“Seems fine to me,” he said, obviously puzzled.

“Oh, sure,” I muttered, “now that I’ve already had to swallow the equivalent of Lake Erie.”

The dentist and the assistant spent the next 10 minutes trying to convince the repairman that the suction device had indeed coughed, sputtered and died, and they honestly hadn’t called him back to the office for no valid reason.

I even added my two cents’ worth, assuring him that the suction device hadn’t worked at all on me, but he gave me a look that told me he thought I’d had too much Novocain.

I’d gone to the dentist’s at two o’clock. I came home at 4:45 with a temporary crown, an emergency supply of cement (just in case the temporary crown should fall off), and an emaciated checkbook.

And for some reason, for the next two days I just couldn’t stop humming “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?”

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