Laughter is patient's best medicine.

Byline: Bob Welch / The Register-Guard

I went to the dentist Thursday, which is always harder on him than on me. That's because the first time I sat in his chair I told him The Story. And ever since, he worries that I'll sue him. Or, worse, write about him.

On that initial visit, I told him how years ago, in Bend, I had bid my wife farewell and gone to have a routine cavity filled.

"Close down," said the dentist when the procedure was over. "We're all done."

There was just one problem: I couldn't close down.

"I ah oh ie ow," I said, trying to tell him "I can't close my mouth."

"What?"

"I ah oh ie ow."

After trying unsuccessfully to coax my jaw shut, the dentist grabbed a pen and wrote something that, I later realized, had potential to wind up as "Exhibit A" in a lawsuit trial: It was the address of an oral surgeon's office. My dentist wanted me to drive to it.

Looking back, I should have written back: "No way. Drive me. Now. I could choke to death. And you wouldn't want that, now would you?"

Instead, I drove across Bend with my mouth stuck wide open. When I pulled up to stoplights, people in cars next to me would furrow their brows, then start laughing. I think they thought I was singing the last note - a really long last note - of some opera.

I just smiled back, acting inconspicuous, not easily done while looking like some middle-school kid seeing how high he could throw Milk Duds and still catch them in his mouth.

I thought about how I could drown in my own saliva, immediately deciding this was a bad idea, given how nobody wants his epitaph to say: "He drowned in his own spit, the loser."

Finally, I found the cluster of medical buildings near the hospital, rushed in the front door and asked the receptionist for a pen. I wrote that I had been sent by my dentist.

She frowned a very strange frown, and then I realized why.

"This," she said, "is a gynecology office. You probably want the office next door."

My eyes bulged to the size of pingpong balls. I turned and looked around. Women, most of them pregnant, were staring at me from the waiting room. I just stared back, open-mouthed.

I took the paper and wrote the name of the oral surgeon I was to see. The receptionist pointed me to his office. He shot me full of Valium, waited for my body to relax, then put me up against the wall. He jiggled my jaw. I felt as if I were being mugged in a back alley, but somehow my mouth shut.

"There we go," he said. "You had a dislocated jaw."

A dislocated jaw? Aren't those what you get when you get hit with a curveball that doesn't curve? All I'd done was gone to the dentist.

I started walking out the door. "No, no, no," said the nurse. "You can't drive. You'll need to have someone pick you up."

I called my wife. She wasn't home. I called a friend. He wasn't home. I had only one choice: I called a friend of my wife's.

An hour later, the friend showed up and drove me home. In the meantime, Sally had returned to the house. I staggered out of the woman's car, the Valium still making me loopy, my speech slightly slurred.

My wife hurried onto the front porch. She looked at me. She looked at her best friend.

"Don't ashk," I said.

So, that's The Story. A colleague wonders if there's a metaphor in it, some deeper truth to be learned. Like: Keep your eyes open and your mouth shut.

I tend to believe it was just one of those funnier-after-it-was-over incidents that you tell when the world is grinding its teeth over elections, Fallujah, racism and more. To remind us that, amid it all, Ecclesiastes is right:

There is a time to laugh - just don't open your mouth too widely in the process.

Bob Welch can be reached at 338-2354 or at [e-mail].