My teeth are terrible, genetics is to blame. Me, my brother, and my sister all inherited my father's teeth. I took his advice to heart, don't waste your money on dentists, you're going to lose them all anyway. He was right.
I have a problem though, a rare allergy. Dentists know this as the Citanest allergy. Any time I have discussed this problem with doctors or nurses they accuse me of lying or making up stories, yet to dentists this is a scenario they are familiar with and trained for.
I am allergic to the chemical they use as a preservative in adrenilin, it's a common chemical called Sodium Metabisulphate. It's a common chemical used by wineries and breweries to sterilise bottles, it's also used by commercial fishermen to sterilise their catch. I can drink wine and eat fish, ingesting this chemical causes me no harm. Yet an epipen will kill me.
Injecting this chemical in to my bloodstream is a very different story. The neurologist told me that what happened to me is called a Full Neural Seizure. Brain death. The dentist gave me a needle and then 30 seconds later I was dead. He said there's absolutely nothing medical science can do about that, once the brain is gone there's nothing else they can work with. He said that it's just an odd fluke that in roughly 50% of cases the brain will just start up again automatically by itself, like mine did after 1 1/2 minutes, but if it doesn't there's nothing they can do about it.
I have been to dentists since that of course, but I always explain the allergy to them. I felt so sorry for the last one, she was only a young woman. She gave me a needle and watched me intently, then after a while I got bored and asked her when she was going to start work. She said she was still watching for a reaction and I said "You're right sweetheart, if you gave me the wrong anaesthetic I'd already be dead.". Her face almost turned inside out, she was horrified.