The boy was seven years old, skinny as a starved bird and half-laying in the dentist chair. He tried to close his eyes to make the brutal sense of disgust go away, but the warm and bright light from the lamp, directly above his face, instantly reminded him of the seriousness of the situation. The room was small and it smelled like…a cold and sterile kind of a smell — like a morgue. 

There were three persons in the room besides himself. First, there were the dentist herself — Olga from Russia. He’d heard shocking stories from his peers at school about her. “She’ll just shove that huge cow-syringe with its six inch needle right into your gum without pardons.” “When she leans over you, her chest is bigger than parade balloons, and they’ll smother you until you can’t breath no more…” “Her hands are larger than a cast iron pan!” And so on — there never seemed to be enough stories about Olga. 

The evening before, he had, over and over been visualizing this day in his mind. He hadn’t been able to put the picture together — it had been a very complex puzzle involving way too many pieces. Eventually he had fallen asleep, and when he awoke the fear was gone. Until he sat down to breakfast and his mother said: “Don’t forget you have the dentist appointment today.”

Olga walked around the room, preparing things. The other two in the room, perhaps her assistants, two younger women on witch he could only see their eyes because they had their mouths covered up. They were silently chatting about what they’d done the day before, about a sailboat on the sea, about a guy.

“We’ve looked at your X-RAY’s and found a few cavities needed to be repaired,” Olga began in a professional manner. “They’re all on the same side, so I think we can do them all today…” she continued. She stepped on something below him and the chair started moving. He declined into an almost laying position. “Open your mouth wide,” she said with a bit more determination. He looked at her, right into her black, dead, and empty eyes. She — on the other hand — was looking inside his mouth, poking around with a mirror while she muttered some incoherent words to herself. Her hands weren’t as large as pans however, he noticed that. 

 “Open wider now!” First arrived that little thing that looked a bit like a plastic toy shaped like an Escargot with a noticeable vacuuming sound coming from it — and then, there it was, the cow-syringe going straight towards his mouth. The two assistants had moved closer now and was holding out pieces of cotton and handkerchief’s. He was going to bleed. 

The six inches of the needle penetrated the flesh of his gum, and it felt like at least all six of them went inside until he almost passed out in pain. Tears where running down both of his cheek. It was so overwhelming that he felt he had to throw up because of it; the smell and the dentist large chest that was now hovering right above him like a dark cloud. There was another penetration by the needle, and maybe a third and a forth. He couldn’t count them.

 “We’re just going to have to wait for a few minutes and then we’ll get to your cavities,” Olga said with a straight, every-day tone. His gum quickly started to go numb, in fact, all the way up this his eye socket, all the way to his ear, and all the way down his throat. 

The three women soon arrived to his attention, and once again he was asked to open his mouth as wide as he possible could. A drill was lowered to his face. “You won’t feel a thing young chap,” one of the assistants supportively told him. In went the drill. The sound in itself was frightening enough, but the pain that struck him when the drill hit a nerve couldn’t even be described in words. It was such an immediate white charge of pain that his whole body bended in the chair like he’d been possessed. “You can’t feel thing,” laughed the other assistant: “it’s all in your imagination!” He could hear her, but weren’t able to speak. All he knew was that if this was his own imagination he would never imagine anything ever again. 

On the way home, holding his mothers hand, he could hear music in his head. It was sort of a happy tune, swing or something; fuzzy tones from a historical distance. He didn’t understand it back then, but much later learned that the type of filling that was put in his teeth could accidentally pick up on radio-waves and hence it sounded like you had a radio inside your head. He couldn’t have said anything about it though. His mouth was still numb and swollen, filled with cotton, blood and some kind of nursing ointment. He was still in a moment of disgust and quite dizzy, but despise that — he’d already started to fantasize about the next day at school.