A painting of me

My Mouth is Frozen

   28 August 2007, early evening

The right side of my mouth is partially frozen. The last time my mouth was frozen like this I had just taken lost 4 wisdom teeth; today, I had a cavity filled. My old dentist was a little bit more gung-ho in his approach to dealing with cavities. Dr. Singh would look at my teeth and say to himself, “I think we can do this without freezing.” He would then proceed to drill a hole in my teeth. I managed to get two cavities filled this way, so clearly, he could do it without freezing. Still, I wouldn’t call either event pleasant.

 

Comments

  1. Is this a cultural difference? I’ve never heard it called “freezing” them. Is that literal, like actually using something cold? We just call it using novocaine, or perhaps the verb anesthetizing.

  2. It’s just another way of saying anesthetizing I suppose. I had Novocain injected into my mouth to freeze it. I don’t think it’s just a Canadian thing though.

  3. Weird. I mean, we refer to numbness and all of that, but I’ve never ever heard someone from the US call it freezing. There are other US Americans (with and without maps) around here, anyone have an idea?

Don't be shy, you can comment too!

 
Some things to keep in mind: You can style comments using Textile. In particular, *text* will get turned into text and _text_ will get turned into text. You can post a link using the command "linktext":link, so something like "google":http://www.google.com will get turned in to google. I may erase off-topic comments, or edit poorly formatted comments; I do this very rarely.