Ninjas vs Dentists

When I was a kid (heck, even until now), I wanted to be part of some dark and shadowy world. I daydreamed about being a spy, or a ninja, or an assassin, part of some secret society, proficient in all kinds of weapons, training in deadly martial arts, mastering the art of deceit, delivering world-changing information, and of course, saving the world. Kung Fu movies, manga and anime, and James Bond were the source material for my fantasies.

Yes, being a super ninja-spy-assassin was great — except for the fact that being captured was always an inevitable plot point. Capture would involve jail, interrogation, and *gulp* torture. Typical heroes would usually cry out, “I won’t give up!” or “I won’t tell you!” as they got beat up by the evil overlord’s goons. Eventually, friends would come to the rescue, or the hero goes into some sort of rage mode and kills everyone in sight. As I got older and my source material shifted from cartoons to books and actual research, these dramatic and fantastic rescues or sudden bursts of power gave way to more realistic psychological drama and torture that was beyond getting turned into a human punching bag. Ninjas were wise to commit suicide before they got captured.

Even so, I didn’t let these details get in the way of my fantasizing. One thing that Shonen manga always taught was that willpower can overcome anything. In my head, I was still the perfect super ninja-spy-assassin thingy who never gave up and never surrendered. At least, until I got a taste of extreme pain.

Yesterday, I went for a visit to what many children perceive as a hive of evil: a dental clinic.

It was just a small clinic that had the luxury of having two dental chairs. The dentist was an old family friend and she was a kind woman who let her dogs laze around inside the clinic. She also had a small stereo playing songs of the Rihanna-Kei$ha (is that how you spell it?) type. There were some Korean pop songs in there too and she told me with a laugh that it was her daughter’s playlist. She proceeded to comment about the current Philippine fad for Korean girl/boy bands before settling down to business.

She looked over my teeth and pointed out what tooth needed this and what tooth needed that. Given the state my teeth were in, I knew an extraction was inevitable. I had a rotten molar that was screaming to be pulled out, and given most media regarding dentists (I think there’s a horror movie called “The Dentist”), it could be a very harrowing experience. I just thanked the gods for the gift of modern medicine and anesthesia.

She started by cleaning the general area of the tooth, then took out what looked like a metal syringe, probably the one she uses for applying anesthesia. It’s interesting that the day before, I was watching a friend of mine studying dentistry, practice various techniques of applying anesthesia on his brother. He recited each part of the procedure while using a cotton swab as a substitute for a syringe. Paying attention and a little imagination goes a long way though, and I winced every time he used his makeshift syringe.

Sitting on the dental chair, I tried not to think about that and willed myself to relax. I barely felt the needle go in, and I started to feel a part of my face puffing up and going numb. After a few more injections, my cheek started to feel papery and I started having trouble keeping drool inside my mouth. My mouth was already numb, and I expected things to go smoothly. She could have sliced my cheek open and I wouldn’t have felt a thing. The drugs were working! Yay!

She cleaned a bit more before going for the tooth-pulling part. She took something that looked like a fancy pair of pliers and, with her assistant holding my head in place, started pulling on the tooth. I don’t know if it should have happened, but I could feel the pliers clamping on my tooth. I also felt the tooth being pulled up. It wasn’t really painful, but I could feel the pressure on the poor rotten tooth. In response to the pressure. I started clenching the tissues they gave me to wipe my mouth with. I felt something scrape the tooth and I heard a weird cracking noise. At this point I started to think something was about to go horribly wrong.

The pliers had slipped. She tried again, and it slipped again. The tooth was too chipped and cracked, and it was hard to get a firm hold on it. She talked to my dad about a few details: what was happening and what she was going to need to do to get the job done. She then asked her assistant to get her a few tools that she needed. I wasn’t able to see what kind of tools they were, but I think the idea was similar to using a lever. If the tooth wasn’t going to be pulled out, it was going to be pried out. I took a deep breath. I had faith in modern medicine. My mouth was doped like crazy. It was all going to be okay.

That got me thinking of the nerve-numbing liquids going through my mouth. The purpose of anesthesia is to kill pain. This makes the job easier for doctors to work their magic. With anesthesia, I could be having a little tea party with the whole staff as the doctor pulls out my spleen, which he would proudly display to a burst of applause and laughter. Fun for everyone!

Of course, I was lying to myself. I knew that the whole process was going to be a nightmare. Instead of a little annoying pressure, I was feeling a searing pain whenever they tried to take the tooth out. Wasn’t my mouth supposed to be numb? What the hell was happening?

I knew that the mouth is a giant conglomerate of highly sensitive nerves, that’s why tootaches hurt like hell. But there’s anesthesia right? Those wonder drugs can turn all those highly sensitive nerves into pathetic excuses of chemical signal delivery cells. Well, as it turns out, sometimes, teeth can have very thick roots. If you’re one of the lucky ones who have teeth like that, you get to experience a reasonable reenactment of what dental work was like before the invention of magical, nerve-numbing fluids.

But the drugs were working, that was sure. The tooth had to be broken in half to get it out, and what I think was a drill had to be used. I didn’t feel anything when the dentist did that. But whenever she tried to take the tooth out, pain fairies popped up and started a wild mosh pit in my mouth to the beat of RIhanna’s “Please don’t stop the music”.

I could only take sharp gasps whenever the pain became too hard to handle. Not long after, my voice was joining in, adding a little squeak here and there. Eventually a scream would break out. The dentist would stop what she was doing. Take out bloody pieces of cotton from my mouth, take a few breaths, and start the whole thing all over again. I ran through the gasp-squeak-scream sequence a lot of times since the damn tooth was intent on putting up a fight. I tried doing affirmations, telling myself, “I’m letting go… I let go… I surrender… I trust in what the dentist is doing… I let go…”  

I should probably been more assertive since the tooth was not even thinking of easing its grip on my gums. .

Sometime later, an explosion of pain left me gasping for breath. She had taken something out! Oh joy! She was done… with half of the tooth.

Don’t you just love video game bosses with two forms? Your fingers are already bleeding from inputting commands, you’ve used up almost all your skills, you’ve run out of healing items, and the boss looks like it’s been beat. Then the damn boss turns out to still be alive and this time, he transforms into his true form, usually bigger, crazier, and guaranteed to be nightmare fuel. The second half of my tooth-extracting odyssey was like that. My mouth was still sore, and I was shaking from the pain I still felt from the extraction of the first half. But the job wasn’t over yet. I took my time swirling the mouthwash they gave me to spit out the bloody mess that was the extraction of the first half, and, with a defeated air, fell back to the dental chair.

I started to think about torture and how some prisoners endured it. It reminded me of how a lot of Catholic saints’ claim to fame was that they were tortured in many creative ways. The one I most remember was what happened to St. Lorenzo Ruiz in Japan. He was the first Filipino saint, and was therefore always part of the Christian values curriculum back when I was in grade school. We youngsters read about his marathon torture-palooza under the Japanese who were trying to make him renounce his faith. He loved God too much to do that, so the Japanese killed him by hanging him upside down a well full of shit. Stories like that, and the shonen anime that I was exposed to, made me think that willpower and a good perspective on one’s values could help a person endure anything. Never mind that I read George Orwell’s hope-crushing novels and felt a bit of truth in them (they were good, they were interesting, but I’m still a sucker for happy endings). I still believed in something strong and undefeatable inside me.

That afternoon, if I was a rebel and I was being tortured for information, I seriously would have ratted out my comrades.

Returning to the second half of the tale of the terrible tooth extraction, things weren’t going easy for me and for the dentist. She had already given me two extra shots of anesthesia, but they weren’t helping. She reassured me every time she made a move that everything was going to be all right, that the tooth was moving, and that it would all be over soon. I tried to believe her, it’s just that even if it was half of what it used to be, the tooth was still one stubborn motherfucker, and it screamed bloody painful murder each time it was moved.

She tried one strategy after another. She’d go back to the pliers, then back to another tool, then to another tool, cycling through her inventory to see what would work. Likewise, I was going through several techniques of my own to cope with the pain. I tried focusing on the pop music playing in the background. (Don’t stop! Make the party rock!) I tried closing my eyes and doing some deep breathing exercises. I tried telling the tooth to just let go and be kicked out of my mouth already. I imagined myself as Paul Atreides of Dune, going through the trial of the gom jabbar (An animal would bite its leg off to stop the pain; a human would endure the pain and play dead in order to get revenge.. or something like that). I even tried turning masochistic, telling myself that the pain was pleasurable (which sorta, kinda worked, but it reminded me too much of Giygas, the big bad evil of Earthbound, “I… feel… good…”).

Another supernova of pain. My voice joining in with a screaming high note. And the tooth was gone! Vanquished forever! It was finished! It was all over! Thank God! Hallelujah!

Looking at the remains of the tooth, it became obvious why it was so stubborn. Aside from having thick roots, my tooth had something else up its sleeve. Most teeth have two roots, those pointy leg things you can see on cartoon teeth. Well, my nightmare tooth had three. Imagine that.

On the way home, the giant hole in my mouth stuck with a big wad of cotton, I rethought the whole ninja-spy-assassin thing. If pain like that was going to be an occupational hazard, I might as well give up on the daydream. If life was an Orwellian nightmare, it would be better to pledge undying allegiance to Big Brother than risk getting sent to the Ministry of Love. I thought about it some more at home while gulping down large spoonfuls of ice cream to dull the aching hole the tooth left behind. I decided that I wouldn’t get involved in anything that might end up with me being tortured. That meant not being part of any guerilla freedom fighter movement. Or anything vaguely radical or activist, given the paranoia of some governments. With chocolate ice cream oozing out of my numb mouth (the hole where the tooth used to be was the only place that hurt, the rest of my mouth was dead to me), I decided to play it safe.

And then I had to write all of this down and rethink everything.

For one thing, these ninja-spy-assassin people would certainly know all about nerve block techniques. What’s to stop them from using it on themselves? With a twist and a jab at a certain bundle of nerves, they could rid themselves of pain. And they’ve obviously been trained to resist pain. They’ve learned techniques to endure pain that would have broken any ordinary mortal. They need to at least have an MA in enduring pain before they become field agents, whatever secret society they work for certainly wouldn’t send out sacrificial sheep agents.  Another thing, being safe is boring, and it sucks. Anything worth doing always has that hind ot risk and danger to it. Pain is something inevitable. And lastly and this was the most important and obvious thought that I had while writing all this down: I have total control of my fantasies!  I can deus ex machina every little problem that pops up. Why should I give up being an awesome gunslinging, swordswinging, and limb-breaking ninja-spy-assassin of the shadows?