Dentist, Tongues, and great inventions

I went to the dentist today and unfortunately have to go back tomorrow for a ‘touch up’ on two of my fillings. I have some temperature sensitivity around two of my teeth and the dentist wants to go ahead and clean them out and fix them. Boo for cavities…

As the hygienist was cleaning my teeth I started thinking about my tongue. I try to be a helpful patient and move my tongue to the opposite side of my mouth when they are working. ( Don’t laugh at me, you all do it, you just don’t admit it out loud to anyone). So when I got back to work, I was looking in the bathroom mirror and opened my mouth and moved my tongue around to see if it was actually helpful……it’s not..…next time you are alone in front a mirror try it. Your tongue is actually pretty fat. And when you try to smush it to one side, you don’t really save that much space on the other side. If I was a hygienist, I would probably laugh for the first few months at my patients tongues as the flop around in their mouths.

Do you remember spit bowls? The dentist would hand you a cup of water to rinse with and you would have to try to sit up in a reclining chair and spit into this small bowl that sucked the water down….(and then you had this stream of spit that you had to figure out how to gracefully get rid of and hope they didn't see). Yeah, now they squirt the water into your mouth and have this L-shaped straw thing that you just close your mouth around and it sucks the water out of your mouth….genius! If your dentist doesn’t have one, they need to get one.