#Novocaine March 12

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Today contribution to the 30-Day Letter Writing Coach4aday Challenge is on NOVOCAINE.

The challenge involves composing a letter to yourself when you were an earlier age. The goal is to focus on a value, habit, or choice that needs to be adopted or made.

For the first 19 years of my life, I went to a dentist that did not utilize any type of numbing medication for any dental procedures including filling a cavity. Let’s just say that when I heard the whirling of the drill it did not generate positive vibes.

Day 12 Letter-Dental Visit

November 1972

Dear College Student Dan:

It is a Friday night, and you are sitting in your dorm room inside Scott Hall at East Carolina University and one of your very back teeth begins to ache. Over the next two nights it becomes unbearable. Try as you might no amount of Anbesol gives you any relief. Compounding your misery no dental office in Greenville NC will answer the phone on the weekend. You make a game plan when the office of Dr Capps opens at 8AM you are going to be standing at that door even though you don’t have an appointment.

Visits to the dentist office have never been pleasant. Your dentist back home in Morristown NJ Dr. Vincent Reilly was in his 60’s when you were his patient in the 1960’s. In all your visits to see him to address cavities you had never had any type of numbing medications. When he drilled a tooth, he was going to hit a nerve and you were going to jump. So, you couldn’t imagine what the increase in pain was going to be to address what you had going on.

If there ever was a day when people were understanding and kind to you it was when that dentist office opened. Staff and patients with an appointment all could tell you were hurting, and they got you back to see Dr. Robert Capps. He informed you that you had a terrible abscess infection. You could have it extracted or a root canal. You contemplated both and decided to have it pulled.

What happened next became a moment of delight. The dentist informed you that he was going to administer NOVOCAIN to numb any pain. At age 19 for the first time in your life as a dental patient you had a procedure without pain. You will be grateful for the rest of your life that sitting in the dental chair didn’t have to involve pain.

Grown Up Dan