Generally, when you’re faced with a new experience, you will underestimate it. Either it will be far worse or far better than your imagination, seldom matching a realistic expectation. In 2016, 1.2 million Millennial women gave birth for the first time, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Each of them knew giving birth was the natural order of things. Their mothers did it; countless others did it. Experts told them what to expect. Many of them attended birthing classes that consisted of lectures, discussions and exercises. But for each, giving birth was a unique experience for them and them alone. Pain couldn’t be shared. Neither could your first day at school, first kiss, first public talk, first broken bone, first attempt at the big trick. You get the idea. Then along comes dental implants. The ADA says U.S. dentists place more than five million implants every year. Now that you own four of them, you were never naive about the procedure. Drilling holes in your maxilla would be no trivial matter. Numbing both left and right maxilla most likely would be a teeth clenching adventure except no one can clench with a gaping mouth. That was your first guess. Next you imagined it would be a noisy, but relatively simple matter of drilling the implant holes directly through gum and into bone, followed by screwing in the implants themselves. Doubtless there would be other minor details. But you dismissed them. Because when you asked about conscious sedation, nurses and Doc alike shrugged off the option as unnecessary. Thinking back decades, you remember the British dentist in Tokyo asking if you wanted Novocaine for a mouthful of cavities. You opted not and over several visits endured the singular pain of touchy nerves, proving you were nothing, if not pain amenable. That was then. As it happens in life, you’ve since been wrong about almost everything. Almost. The injections were — clench — clench — clench — clench — clench — clench — as predicted. The rest was pollyanna imagining. Reality proved that Doc had to “remove” your gum to reveal bone. On both the left and right side of your face, it sounded like a harsh scraping, a chiseling process. He used something called an “elevator” to push and peel back each flap of gum tissue, so the bone underneath was exposed. Bloody awful, you thought, visualizing the carnage. The drilling regimen was complicated to the bone (pun intended). You lost count of how many separate drillings there were per implant — maybe three or four — each successively larger in diameter than the previous. Your mind wandered through the noise, the pain and the fluids seeping down your throat. Almost sleepily, with no intent, you conjured a scene from 1976 flick Marathon Man, when Dustin Hoffman is captured and tortured by Laurence Olivier who plays the role of vicious, sadistic Nazi war criminal Christian Szell. In 1945, drill wielding dentist Szell ran the experimental camp at Auschwitz where he conducted pain experiments on an unlimited supply of defenseless prisoners. This is silly, you thought. Just because your Doc decided to incomprehensibly stretch the corner of your mouth back to your ear doesn’t make him a sadist. Perhaps an unfeeling mechanic, but not a fiend. Shutting out delusional thoughts, the first implant drilling seemed over and you waited for Round 2. Unfortunately, the bell didn’t ring ending Round 1. And out came The Hammer. In dental lexicons, the instrument has a more friendly name — Dental Mallet. This is a device commonly used for each and every implant. No one told you — or warned you — about The Hammer. According to medical journals, you learned that “an abutment is fastened into an implant to provide an anchor for the prosthesis — that the method of application involves placing a blunt mechanical punch against that abutment and tapping the end of it with a dental mallet.” As always, these written procedures are purposefully benign. Because in truth, your surgeon pounded the punch at least seven concussive times for a single installation. Welcome to instant headache, pal. You feared your scalp would split. You swore blood was seeping from your eyes and ears, but Doc and assistant didn’t seem to notice; and in fact were discussing cupcakes and other pastries in the kitchen. The irony didn’t escape you. Enduring torture while the torturers themselves discussed sampling confections. That’s when you began to giggle . . . and giggle . . . at the absurdity of it all. By this time, Doc was well into the second installation. And out came The Hammer. By then, between blows, you pondered only one thought besides permanent brain damage — you were paying a small fortune for this uniquely delivered headache. Lesson? Respect  sedation — unconscious sedation.