Scraping the Plaque

In which I explain how my dental hygienist is my new role model for revising a book.

My dental hygienist is not afraid of my teeth. She does not stare at them, ignoring them even though she can't stop thinking about them, while she pretends to focus on other things. She doesn't whine about how hard it's going to be before she even starts. She greets my teeth with an eager smile that makes them feel like great teeth. She washes her hands of problems from other patients. Then she grabs the tools she needs, reviews her notes from my last visit, and dives right in.

My dental hygienist does not pussyfoot around. She takes that giant hook scraper thingy and digs into my gums until they bleed. She ruthlessly cuts off the plaque, the tartar, all the nastiness keeping my teeth from being all they can be. She never says, "Well, a little plaque never hurt a mouth" or "But it took so long to get the plaque there just right!" She doesn't save the plaque scrapings in a separate file because she's attached to them. She just trashes it, all of it, and focuses on my teeth.

My dental hygienist does one thing at a time. She doesn't stop to polish while she's scraping. She doesn't get all excited about someone else's teeth as an avoidance mechanism. She doesn't stop in the middle to blog about my teeth or to reward herself for being half done with a quick game of Minesweeper. She scrapes and scrapes and when she's finally done, she checks again before moving in with the spinning polishing shrieking thing. And she waits until that's done to floss.

My dental hygienist didn't ignore the whatever it was she found on that one tooth even after she was all done. She didn't say, "Aargh! I already fixed that once!" or "It'll be fine; let's wait and see if my agent notices." She went back in with the scraper thingy, even though it meant polishing and rinsing and flossing all over again.

At the end of it all, my dental hygienist rinses my teeth and sucks out any remaining drool with that mouth vacuum that makes you feel like it might turn your head inside out. I don't know what part of the revising metaphor that is -- except that revising makes me feel like turning my head inside out.

I will say this: my dental hygienist did all of the above without a drop of coffee or a single Snickers bar.

I guess nobody's perfect.