Numb



Almost everyone has felt it before. That strange feeling in your cheek after you have your tooth numbed from the dentist. It's sort of like the side of your face feels swollen or puffy. Or sometimes like it's not even there.

"Two cavities," said the dentist, looking into the mouth of nine year old Natalie's mouth, "I'm going to fill one of the cavities now and you can come back for a checkup later to fill the other one."

"Why?" asked Natalie.

"I don't like to numb both sides of the face at once. It can be dangerous," said her dentist. Natalie tensed up in her chair.

"How so?"

"Because you won't be able to feel your face and you could harm yourself while you're eating. You could make sores on your tongue or cheeks from biting them," he said smiling at her.



Natalie tasted the sourness of the Novocaine numbing the left side of her face. It felt swollen and puffy. She decided to test what the dentist said by biting her cheek. She couldn't feel a thing and she felt confident about the procedure. So the dentist drilled her tooth and fixed her cavity painlessly. Her mom set up an appointment for her to come back for the other cavity in a few days.

On the ride home, she couldn't stop biting her cheek. It was amusing to her. She couldn't feel a thing. Eventually, she felt chunks of her cheek rolling around in her mouth and she could taste blood. But why stop if she couldn't feel it? This was fun.

She got home and kept chewing and chewing. Spitting chunks of bloody flesh onto the floor.

"Natalie?" her mom called. "Where are you?"

Natalie's mom heard a strange gargling noise from her room.

She slowly peeked in through a crack in the door and saw her young daughter in the corner, her face toward the wall.

"Natalie?" she called out once more.

"You know," said Natalie's nearly unintelligible voice. "The dentist is right."

Natalie turned and faced her mom with a most terrifying sight.

Her whole cheek. Gone. Her jaw was hanging off the other side of her face as if on a hinge, and Natalie sat in a pool of blood which cascaded from what was left of her mouth. She tried to form a smile, but the stretching of her face caused her whole bottom jaw to fall off.

In a slurring, gargling voice she managed to say, "I can't even feel a thing!"

Bipolaroid