Let me just try to describe yesterdays level of crapitude

A friend of mine once told me he thought my worst fear was probably getting a root canal by a clown on an airplane. That pretty much sums up my day yesterday!

New readers might not know this, but I have severe, severe, dental anxiety. I try to be logical about it and I try to tell myself to calm the fuck down, but it is what it is and without anti-anxiety medications I have been known to cancel appointments. Repeatedly. Fortunately I have a very understanding dentist office, and even though they are going through some staff changes they are very responsive to my needs. If Valium is what it takes to get me in that chair, Valium they shall give me.

Yesterday started off pretty fun. Wake up, have coffee, play a little Farmville, and then on Facebook my back-yard neighbor, JJ, drops me a message and says he’s up and to call him, he has something for me. So we meet in the back yard, he comes in and we have some coffee, Tim wakes up and they start talking programming, and I hop in the shower and get ready for The Ordeal.

So I took my lone Valium at 10 AM, after my shower, in preparation for my lovely, gentle, patient friend Jenn to pick me up and take me to the dentist. After that we were going to go to lunch and have some quality girl time. I had not eaten breakfast, having totally forgotten to do so while hanging out with Tim and JJ, so I was really looking forward to either Harry’s, or Chopstix, or really any place that had good food and Jenn and I could sit for a while and just hang. Both of us run businesses (this is Jenn’s, and I highly recommend it) and we don’t really get as much quiet together time as we used to back in The Day.

So we get to the dentists, and I start getting a little anxious in spite of the Valium when it turns out I have to have yet another new hygenist. I had the same one for about 14 years, relaxed with her to the point where I didn’t need valium for about the last ten years of seeing her, and then the anxiety started all over again a little over a year ago when she retired and I got a new one. Now there’s a third one, and I’m all NOT FREAKING OUT I AM FINE NOT FREAKING ME OK.

While she’s all up in my mouth looking at how good or bad my teeth care has been, she hears my stomach rumbling. When asked (I’m a terrible liar) I admit that I haven’t had breakfast. NOTE TO SELF: LIE NEXT TIME. This turned out to not be the smartest thing I could have done because after she looked at my teeth she decided I needed a much deeper cleaning that I had come in for – ONE THAT WOULD INCLUDE NUMBING AND HORSE-SIZED NEEDLES AND PERHAPS CLOWNS – and they wouldn’t give it to me then because I had not eaten. In the back of my head I was thinking “well this isn’t so bad because now Jenn and I can go to lunch early and I’ll just blow this popsicle stand and come back in a couple weeks” until it seeps into my ears that she has said she has something open at 3 PM this afternoon. Then all I could think of was that this Valium, which suddenly wasn’t doing much of a job being all anti-anxiety whatsoever, was certainly going to not be useful four hours later.

They promised me nitrous, they gave me a sheet for me to sign over my firstborn – I mean, a sheet that told me how much this torture was going to cost, and they told me to go have lunch and come back at 3. I did much crying and snivelling out in the car, and bless Jenn’s heart because she talked me into going back in and asking for more Valium. They offered me nitrous a couple more times and I kept crying and hiccuping hysterically until finally Jenn came out with “look, this is what she’s like and she just took Valium about an hour and a half ago. What do you think she’s going to be like in FOUR MORE HOURS? It would behoove you to get her more Valium.” I love my Jenn. More Valium it was, and we went to go pick it up and then were off to have lunch at Harry’s.

Fast-forward to back at the Dentist’s at 3 where I will gloss over my panic, crying, screaming at the needle, and hysterics (and yeah, that was after TWO Valium that day, so HELLO ANXIETY I BELIEVE YOU ARE REAL). Lots of scraping and high-pitched sounds and my iPod with Norah Jones as loud as I could get it. Jenn sitting near my feet with one hand on my leg to reassure me that she was there to take anyone down should they need killin’.

And I have to go back in a month to make sure the antibiotics they gave me are making everything that was messed up look better.

I CAN’T FUCKING WAIT.