Here's How It Continued

Continued from the post before...

After about a half an hour the alarm went off, the fire trucks drove away, the people petered back in (can you peter in? I've only ever petered out, but I like the sound of it). Five minutes or so after that, I heard my name.

Now, I have to back up a bit and explain that the woman I saw last week was very nice, and I assumed I would be seeing her today. I knew the name on my appointment card was not the same as hers, but it was the same name that had been on my check-in slip last week -- so I thought maybe she'd just gotten married or something and hadn't gotten a new nametag yet. Or something.

But when I checked in, they referred to my doctor as a him, and there's just no way she got reassigned that quickly.

Now, call me crazy, but I prefer a woman dentist. Man doctors, for some reason, but woman dentists. And the woman (whose last name on her tag I now know was for real) was Japanese. I have no feelings about that either way but -- and I'm sure this is politically incorrect on some level but I'm being honest here -- this name was German. Very German. I don't know why, but I had visions of some 70-year-old Auschwitz survivor with shaky hands, who would yell at me for never having got the crown put on eleven years ago.

I started to sweat a little when I realized this, but I began to shake in earnest when Dr. German called my name.

To be continued...