Patient Tries To Stay Professional At Dentist Appointment, But Things Go Wrong Again

Dentist appointments are awkward enough when you’re trying to answer questions with someone’s hands in your mouth. Add one badly phrased comment and an unfortunate misunderstanding, and suddenly finding a new dentist starts sounding easier than ever making eye contact again.

One patient learned this during two visits with an otherwise kind and thoroughly professional dentist. At the first appointment, an innocent conversation about being strangers prompted her to blurt out that he had already “been inside of my mouth for 20 minutes,” leaving them both visibly embarrassed.

Determined to redeem herself during visit number two, she barely spoke at all. Somehow, that made what happened next even worse. Keep reading to see how flavored gloves turned her perfectly ordinary dental appointment into another painfully memorable encounter.

A dental patient tries to avoid another awkward moment, only to make things even stranger

Almost everyone has experienced the peculiar horror of saying something innocent, hearing how it sounded a second too late, and wishing they could rewind the conversation. The OP managed that during her very first appointment with a new dentist.

Telling him that he was no longer a stranger because he had “been inside of my mouth for 20 minutes” apparently sounded far more suggestive than intended. She left embarrassed, but at least she could return determined to behave like the world’s least memorable dental patient.

That plan makes the second appointment much funnier. She barely spoke, yet noticed the dentist becoming flushed and uncomfortable again.

Eventually she realized she had been absentmindedly licking his flavored gloves while he worked. What makes the situation painfully relatable is that neither incident appears intentional. Her attempts to avoid awkwardness somehow produced an even stranger encounter.

There is a psychological reason moments like these can feel enormous. People tend to overestimate how much others notice and remember their embarrassing behavior.

Psychologists Thomas Gilovich, Victoria Medvec, and Kenneth Savitsky demonstrated this phenomenon in research on the “spotlight effect.” Participants consistently believed their appearance or embarrassing actions were more noticeable to other people than they actually were.

Psychologist Susan Krauss Whitbourne also explains in Psychology Today that embarrassment is fundamentally social: it appears when people believe they have violated expectations about how they should present themselves.

Yet showing embarrassment can have a surprisingly positive function because it communicates awareness of social norms rather than indifference toward them.

That distinction changes the story slightly. From the OP’s perspective, two appointments have created an irreversible reputation. From the dentist’s perspective, he may simply have encountered a nervous patient who made an awkward remark and then reacted automatically to flavored gloves.

Dental professionals routinely work with people who are anxious, uncomfortable, numb, drooling, gagging, or unsure what to do with their tongues. Her internal catastrophe may therefore be much larger than his interpretation of it.

There is also something endearing about the dentist’s response. He apparently remained professional during both encounters rather than embarrassing the patient further. That allowed two awkward moments to remain exactly what they were: awkward moments.

So abandoning an otherwise good dentist may be unnecessary. If she can survive walking through the door a third time, the simplest strategy is to acknowledge nothing, follow instructions, and let enough ordinary appointments bury the memory.

Although, given her track record, mentally rehearsing “do absolutely nothing unusual” might be tempting fate.

Here’s the comments of Reddit users:

These dentists reassured OP that patients accidentally licking or sucking fingers is surprisingly common during dental appointments.

These commenters encouraged OP to embrace the awkwardness and return rather than avoid the dentist forever

These commenters turned the embarrassing interaction into playful jokes about attraction and flirtation

These Redditors found the story hilarious and suggested OP make the next appointment even funnier

Have you ever had a situation that felt impossible to recover from, only to realize everyone else forgot about it quickly? Would you return to the same dentist after this? Share your thoughts below!