All hail the goddess!

My dentist knows I dislike her.  My dentist who is a sweetly natured, gentle and proficient woman knows I approach her surgery with all of the trepidation and deep seated anxiety of a true dental coward.  I have a phobia so powerful that if my wife didn't prod and cajole and remind me that my appointment was due then I wouldn't go.  My detestation of the dental profession is so strong that when the children were younger I would take them with me so that I would have to be brave.  And that didn't always work.  But my dentist knows this and once gave me a Being Brave badge for not crying out.  When I stand up from her chair my legs wobble and I stagger slightly for the few seconds it takes me to exit her surgery.  Walking down the street, as the distance grows between her dental practice and my retreating figure, I breathe more freely.  Despite all of this, I recognise her value.  I openly acknowledge the importance of regular visits to her satanic suite of brightly-lit rooms where the sickly sweet smell of decaying molars and medicated mouthwash seems to linger and perfume the air.  Life without my highly capable and silver tongued dentist would be grim indeed.  For all of those foolish people who wish they had lived in an earlier age, I would only ask that they consider life without effective dental hygiene and dental surgery, a life without anaesthesia, a life without the wonders of penicillin.  Just look at the picture and consider the Ancient Egyptian priestess whose skull showed the horrific marks of poor dental hygiene in the shape of a fist sized hole eaten into her jaw, the result of a tooth gone bad.   So it is I grit my teeth (sorry ... ) and pay my dues (literally) to the patron saint of dentists (probably) St. Apollonia of Alexandria.  All hail the goddess!