The Heidi Sphere

Getting a tooth pulled is a traumatic and painful ordeal. Having someone leaning over you with metal implements that look like they're straight from the middle ages, while telling you you'll feel a small pinch and some pressure, is enough to send anyone into survival mode. Once the bones start cracking, the demon tries to soothe you into submission with calming words such as, 'you're doing great' and 'you'll hear some funny sounds now' and 'it's either this or I devour your soul'. The urge to physically defend yourself by assaulting the person in the face may seem overwhelming, but is rarely the best decision that can be made at the moment.

Here are five ways to avoid a physical altercation with your dentist before, during or after your procedure.

1- Imagination. You are Sam Beckett from Quantum Leap, and if you don't go through with the procedure you will create a ripple effect in the time space continuum and somehow cause the obliteration of your own grandmother and never be born at all. While never being born may sound like a better alternative at the time, Sam won't get a chance to jump home and that's just mean.

2- Karma. Your dentist hates it as much if not more than you do. In fact, he or she is 6.64% more likely than any other profession to kill themselves, so unless you are also a dentist, realize those odds balance out in your favor in the long run.

3- Sick Day. Let's face it. You can get a day off out of this. Let the monster do what he or she may and then go home and eat ice cream all day. Spitting blood and having a swollen face for a week is a small price to pay for a clean conscience about missing work. You can even enhance the swelling with some makeup to make it look all bruised so as to illicit pity from your coworkers the next day. We all deserve a little pampering now and then.

5- Souvenir. After it's all over make sure you ask to have the ejected bone. When they look at you funny say it's against your religion not to bury any part of yourself that has been removed, even your hair, and you'd thank them not to interfere. When you get home, build a gravestone and coffin for your tooth out of whatever you have lying around, making sure you document the process with pictures. You don't have to really bury it, but make sure you make it look believable, with a mound of dirt and the gravestone sticking in the ground. Send these pictures to your dentist in a thank you card, and rest easy knowing that for those 10 minutes of torture you endured, you have given them a lifetime of nightmares.

As you can see, by following any of these helpful strategies while faced with a terrifying ordeal of any kind, you will come out of top in the end.

Thank you for reading, and you're welcome, dentists.