Stories From California

Dentist Assistant - Santa Monica, CA

Today at the dentist, while he was digging into my jaw with his precision instruments making all kinds of disconcerting sounds (not he, the instruments), his assistant apparently was going on a dream vacation to Bavaria.

At least that's what she said while guiding me towards a 3-D-X-ray machine. Three dimensional pictures had to be taken of my lower skull because one of the three root canals in the molar with infection kept bending the precision instruments and the dentist could not figure out why.

Anyway, walking towards the X-Ray room, the assitant asked me. "Where do you come from?" My accent had once again given me away as an immigrant ...

... "Germany" I mumbled, trying to keep the saliva in my numb and tortured mouth in check. "Oh, I was just there..." she chirped and I did not really understand the rest. "Oh, where were you?" I asked. "Bavaria, even though I have friends in Stuttgart, but I like to imagine Bavaria." "Imagine?" The assistant explained again what I did not understood the first time: "When I am standing there while he is working on a patient, instead of being utterly bored, I imagine myself in beautiful places. The Caribbean. Tuscany. Bavaria." And I thought, she was fully focused on handing the correct precision instruments to the doctor and giving me some encouraging smiles.

That's when I realized - she had never looked at me during the root canal ordeal. "I was born in Munich, Bavaria." I said, wondering whether she could know that from my insurance papers. But she seemed honestly surprised. "Well, that is a bit weird." But then again, the assistant said, she has great intuition and imagination.

She had never been to any of these places, but she was confident that she soon would be. "Because I am lucky with money." The asistant had found money in strange places. While scuba diving for example. "I have a feeling, I am going to win the lottery soon", she said. Good for her! 

I might have to try the lottery after getting the bill for my time in the dentist's chair.

I wish those numbers were just a dream!

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