By CHRIS AUSTIN
For The Beachcomber

While slowly driving through a construction site not too long ago, I noticed three trucks from three different companies each with signage ending with the words “and Sons.” The coincidence got me to thinking about my own family business, in my case dentistry. My great uncle practiced in the early part of the 20th century; my father graduated dental school in the 1950s, and I hung up the drill in the late 1990s. While my father and I never practiced at the same time, we did share similar chair-side eccentricities.

Dad set up his practice amid the hustle and bustle of a city, but I changed all that. The day I was born he had his first heart attack (OK, I wasn’t the prettiest baby, but come on!) so it was decided to begin a new practice in an environment with a slower pace. He found a small rural town in southern Ontario that was without the services of a dentist, and a few months later he hung out his shingle.

It wasn’t long before the local hospital called to have him look at the occasional injured jaw. When the call came in, he would shut down the practice, load up his doctoring tools and drive to the hospital. On one particular call, the treatment room contained a young man in a motorcycle jacket with long hair, sporting a broken jaw. That’s what most people would have seen anyway. This was the late 1960s, and my crusty, World War II veteran father saw a long-haired, pinko commie, hippie-type, bent on the downfall of Western democracy, sporting a broken jaw. He gave him a cursory exam and said, “I’m not treating you until you get a haircut.” Without a lot of options, the patient left and got what surely must have been some barber’s most awkward trimming. Treatment predicated on a haircut; I believe that has only happened once in the history of dentistry.

While I wasn’t concerned with my patients’ coiffure, I wasn’t beyond a little mischief myself. My first job after dental school was in the military, stationed in southern California. Everyday started out with sick call. The waiting room was full of young, healthy men in their late teens and early 20s, not too far removed from boot camp. Any real problems would have been taken care of way before they saw me. In short, it was pretty boring.

After every exam the patient would stand up, take a small cup and swish fluoride around for 30 seconds. My particular duty station was originally built for our nation’s strategic blimp fleet and since then had gone through a lot of changes. My examination room, for instance, had the patient’s sink hidden behind a file cabinet. One day after an examination, the patient stood up and I handed him the fluoride. After he swished for 20 seconds, he began searching the room for a place to spit. On the spur of the moment I said as matter-of-factly as possible, “Spit it back in the cup for the next Marine.”

His eyes got big as he stopped swishing then swished once or twice more before dutifully depositing the fluoride back in the cup — gotta love the Marines. I bet he was thinking, “Who the hell came in here before me?” I could only hold my straight face for a second before showing him the sink.

Not all my patient interactions ended up as I expected though. Years later in private practice, I was looking over the chart of a 5-year-old — I’ll call him Little Johnny — before starting my examination, when, totally unprovoked, he said, “My father can count higher than you.” Feeling my arithmetic skills impugned, I lowered my mask and said, “No he can’t.”

An argument worthy of Plato ensued.

“Yes, he can.”

“No, he can’t”

“Yes, he can.”

My debating skills exhausted, I blurted out, “I can count to a hundred bazillion, gazillion!”

The kid wasn’t even phased. He said, “My dad can count all the way to the end.”

My assistant snickered as I sat there with my mouth half open thinking of a comeback, but my brain felt like it had just divided by zero. I smiled and slowly put my mask back on. We both learned a valuable lesson that day. I learned not to match wits with a 5-year-old, and Little Johnny learned not to show up the dentist before an examination.

— Chris Austin is the author of two books available at www.chrisaustinbooks.com. He also works at The Beachcomber.