How did it get that bad? One dentist visit in the last eight year, I guess, isn’t the best path to dental hygiene. In my defense, I had a really traumatizing wisdom-tooth extraction in 2001 (involving accidental drilling on the inside of my mouth rather than the tooth the dentist was aiming for) that prompted my long dental-hiatus. This new dentist is much better. The extraction of that horrible monster up there was actually quite painless and complication-free.