CW Dentistry, obviously.
When I lived in Phoenix, AZ, my insurance for dental was pretty bad despite being employed, so I looked around town for somebody cheap and open, and to my surprise, I found one: a singular dentist who had just recently setup shop. The place was clean, if a bit barren, and of note was the fact that he had no assistants. I found this odd, and said so, but he explained "If I don't have assistants, I don't have to pay them, and therefore I can work cheap."
The siren song of cheap dentistry pulled me in at this moment even though I should have already politely left and not come back. Nobody works alone. Nobody works alone. Nobody in dentistry works by themselves.
I go in for a checkup, he's very nice, very casual, does a cleaning, x-ray, the whole nine. He finds a tooth that's falling apart. Says I need a root canal. Okay, sure. I'm not afraid of a procedure, and he says it'll be cheap. He schedules it, I come back, we get started.
At this point, he straps me down into the chair.
I mean literally my arms and head are strapped to it.
This was warning sign number two.
Then, the phone rings, but it's not his reception phone.
It's another phone.
In a back room.
And he seems surprised by it, and says he has to take this.
This was warning sign number three because what dentist has a secret backroom phone AND WHY
He gives me local anaesthetic. It's alright. Kinda effective, kinda not, but I grin and bear it regardless. He's drilling and drilling and just drilling the shit out of my awful broken tooth, and after a while I'm just spacing out thinking of other things. He had to replace the drill bit at one point because it was worn out (warning sign four what the fuck was he using this drill on that it broke in a new office)
And then he gets up and says "Stay there."
I'm strapped to the table and not paying attention so I mean whatever, right?
In my periphery, I hear something strange. A hissing.
Then I see it.
A blue flame. Coming from a chrome tube.
The man is holding a blowtorch inches from my face.
I realize, all at once, in this moment, all the warning signs, and how now, I am stuck, strapped to a chair, at the mercies of what is absolutely a Mob Dentist.
And I think, crestfallen, about what a stupid fucking idiot I am and how the goddamn hell is my husband going to understand how and why I got blowtorched to fucking death
And then, the weirdest thing happens.
He uses the blowtorch.
To burn off my tooth nerve.
That's all it was for.
Apparently this used to be common practice, like a century ago.
He did it because it's cheap.
He gets through the entire operation, seals up my tooth, does a great job, unstraps me.
My legs are wobbling, which he takes for fatigue or the anesthetic but I know to be relief that this obvious fucking mob front man chose not to savagely murder me.
He was, to date, the best dentist I've ever had, too, and charged 1/4th what any other dentist does. You bet your ass I came back.
