I find the dentist and found the orthodontist some of the most relaxing people to spend my time with. I could just lay back, recline and practically fall asleep, unlike the rest of my busy life. I wish I could recline when I go to see the barber/hair stylist.
My doctor back in MA was pretty good about giving me pep talks, too.
I kind of agree that I find the dentist rather relaxing. Even my recent root canal was kind of nice, apart from the smell.
Are you sure you're not thinking of Little Shop of Horrors, where Steve Martin played a sadistic dentist and Bob Murray wanted despartely to be tortured.
Well, these days they're very generous with the novocaine, and it's also nice to have someone working on you. It's like a manicure but with teeth.
I had a half-formed story idea a few years ago about people who, in an age of rapid-healing and easily-altered appearance (such that all professional people are uniformly beautiful, by day at least), people would mutilate themselves by night and get healed by day. I found in jotting some of it down that I'm perfectly comfortable with ruining one's face, but the teeth stuff started to get to me.
Later I read Iain Banks' Culture novel "Use of Weapons," in a small section of which decadent travellers on a spaceship are mutilated by a surgical machine which sustains their life functions by establishing a field around one's organs which protect them from harm and convey their liquids to the proper place. So you might walk around with your intestine as a scarf, your gut cut away and exposing its absense, etc. It was perfectly safe, of course, but then the unique machine that could restore them was destroyed... and the protagonist left the scene! Banks occasionally puts such demented gems in his books.
Well, they ain't hauling out the novicaine for a checkup... it's not painful, just unpleasant scraping and jaw ache.
I was always jealous of people with dentists who used laughing gas, that just seemed like a lot more fun than a needle jabbed into your gums
The times I've had oral surgery (upper wisdoms, lower wisdoms, and an orthodontic procedure because my adult canines were not coming in), I've been given all of the above; they start with NO2, which is goofy, but doesn't actually induce hilarity. Then I'd get an IV drug-- the last time was certainly fentanyl, a very highly-potent opiate. Remember the Russian operahouse that was taken over by terrorists? Yeah, same stuff they pumped into the vents, so did they pump into my veins. After that, novocaine. I vividly recall during the orthodontic procedure getting a novocaine booster halfway through-- needles going into my hard-palate, ow ow ow.
By the way each time, general anesthesia was an option, but the nonzero risk of death from general is way too high compared to a little mouth discomfort.
I had laughing gas for taking out wisdom teeth and for exposing a tooth to get pulled into place.
A couple years ago, though, they put a screw into my jaw and just used novocaine with good form, brushing some on the gum to numb then jabbing in the needle there.
Yeah, for Wisdom Teeth I had general anesthetic. (heh, watching MASH for a while I thought "general" anesthetic was some better type especially for officers)
I think I shook it off earlier than they expected, waking up alone with a mouth full of bloody cotton.