This is a work of fiction and does not represent any person, living or dead. This work is copyrighted and may not be reproduced in any manner without written permission of the author.
Just prior to receiving my discharge from the Marine Corps, the Navy dentist told me that I should hang around and let him remove my wisdom teeth. Of course I ignored his advice, and the opportunity to obtain this surgery with a free ticket courtesy of Uncle Sam. Yes, he warned me that within a year or two I'd be suffering pain, and the longer I waited the more complicated and painful the surgery would become. But I wanted to get the heck out of California, and especially Camp Pendleton. All I wanted was to get my Honorable Discharge in hand and head back to my home in the Rockies.
For a couple of years I bounced from one job to the next. Most of those jobs involved horses and/or cattle because I'd have minimal contact with human beings. I guess a few years of killing people kind of sours one on the entire human race. Predicting what an equine or bovine might do seemed a lot easier than predicting the actions of Homo sapiens.
Yes, I know I don't sound like a cowboy, but I went to a good high school, funded by all the yuppies that had invaded my mountainous hometown when I was a kid. I guess there was some good coming out of them driving up acreage prices so high that many of my relatives had to sell out their ranches because they couldn't afford the inflated prices, and the attendant property taxes. And, back when I thought I'd make the USMC a career, I spent almost all my spare time working hard on correspondence courses in biology, psychology, chemistry, and other areas of science that piqued my interest. During my last year, I completed forty hours in similar classes at a Southern California college. All I really needed were a dozen hours or so to get a Bachelor of Science degree.
The reading and studying helped me block out the bad years in the Corps, when I was being paid to kill bad people as quickly and as efficiently as possible. For some reason, perhaps because I grew up hunting, I became very good at my assigned task, so much so that I received an offer to attend Officer's Candidate School, which I turned down because I would be required to extend my obligation for another six years. I had already soured on the military, though I still believed in the mission. I guess I was just 'used up' as one old Master Sergeant expressed it.
So, as I entered my third year of ranching, this time on a working ranch that also hosted yuppies in a new dude ranch enterprise, I chose to work the cattle and horses far from the main ranch house, where I had almost no contact with people. In the winter, I'd be totally isolated in a fairly comfortable line shack miles from the nearest telephone or road. Of course that winter is when my wisdom teeth started making their little impacted selves quit well known to me. By the end of the winter, I was haggard with the constant pain, which severely cut into my sleep. A couple of times, the distraction of the pain put me into situations that could have resulted in my death. When one is miles from help, a very simple mistake can lead to serious accidents that wouldn't be all that big of a deal in the city.
So, as the spring thaw hit, I rode into the ranch house and explained the situation to the rancher. He told me to head into the nearest burg with a dentist and get the situation resolved once and for all. More than ready for relief from the increasing pain, I did just as he suggested.
Unfortunately, the aged dentist in town, twenty miles from the ranch, just shook his head after looking at the x-rays he had taken of my teeth, "Son, this is going to require some judicious bone chiseling, and I'm just not up to something that complicated these days. You need to head into the city and get a young dentist that can handle this."
So, with a mild pain killer taking the edge off the pain, I drove another eighty miles into the city. Stopping on the edge of town at a truck stop, I flipped through the yellow pages and found a handful of dentists that specialized in oral surgery. After calling the first three, I was dismayed to find them trying to schedule me for an appointment nearly six weeks in the future. The fourth, and last, was a lady dentist. This time, when I got a receptionist on the phone, I explained more about my situation, and that I couldn't drive back to the ranch and wait a month and a half, without putting my life at risk on the back range. She put me on hold and I soon found myself talking to Dr. Beth, as she billed herself in her phone book advertisement.
After relating what I was told in the Corps by the Navy dentist, how stupid I was for not taking his advice, and how I worked alone in the mountains on the backside of nowhere, she told me to drive straight to her office. Thankfully, the old dentist had given me the x-rays he took, so when I arrived at Dr. Beth's office I handed them to her receptionist as I introduced myself. She told me to take a seat and took them back into the recesses of the office. When she returned, she said the doctor would see me as soon as she finished up with her current patient.
A half hour later, I found myself reclining in one of those rather intimidating chairs in a very modern dental operatory as an incredibly cute dental assistant, Andi, clipped a cloth bib around my neck. We talked for a few minutes as she looked inside my mouth and made some notes on a chart. Every time she leaned forward to peer into my mouth, I had a great view of her cleavage. To my consternation, I felt my prick engorging, inching down the left pants leg of my work jeans. I swear I caught her looking at my crotch more than once. Then she finished her tasks and left the room abruptly.
A moment Dr. Beth bustled in and got busy. After taking a quick history and insuring that I had no history of drug allergies, she stuck the x-rays up on backlit viewing panel, then delved into my mouth with a small mirror and her latex gloved fingers. Within two minutes, this rather frumpy, mousey, forty-something woman withdrew her fingers from my mouth, stripped off her latex gloves.
"Mr. Blake, you require oral surgery to remove those impacted wisdom teeth. Rather than removing one or two at a time, I strongly suggest that we remove all four in one operation. With the use of local anesthetics and nitrous oxide, the process will not be painful. Rather than remove bone to extract your wisdom teeth, I will use a minimally invasive procedure that reduces wounding to your gum tissue by removing tiny portions of the teeth via a very small incision at each molar. That greatly improves healing time."
Of course, considering my limited funds due to a very low paying job, my first response was, "Sure, Doc, but what is this going to cost. Cowboys don't make a whole lot of money."
"The cost per tooth will be $880.00, plus a few ancillary expenses such as pain killers for the recovery period, and perhaps a course of antibiotics. I suspect that two of those molars have precipitated an inflammation that is likely to convert to an overt infection." She looked rather impatient, as if discussing money was beneath her status.
I did some quick mental math, "Dang, Doc! That's almost half what I make in a year! Of course I get room and board thrown in, but after taxes and all the incidentals, I don't clear six thousand a year."
Her eyes narrowed, "Let me see your hands."
