drjeff
Well-known member
My dad briefly had an assistant who chewed through two tanks of nitrous. When the first tank ran empty, he shrugged, did the soapy water test on all the fittings, and figured it was some transient problem with the connection on the last tank. Towards the end of the 2nd tank, he caught her in the chair with the mask on doing 100% nitrous. He was equal parts pissed that she could have suffocated herself by not turning on the "green" tank and pissed that she was huffing gas in his office.
Nitrous has never been my preferred buzz. My dad was also a torture artist with explorers and probes when he was cleaning my teeth and I never even got topical anesthetic. When a hygienist is working on me now, it's amazingly painless dentistry compared to what I grew up with. I get the "does this hurt?" and explain that my dad's idea of a cleaning was a four quadrant gingivectomy with no anesthetic.
I am a 100% believer, and living proof myself , that it is far better and far less painful to have a Registered Dental Hygienist clean one's teeth than an actual dentist! I will admit that I totally can do it, but just like most anything, in the big scheme of things, who's going to be "better" at it, someone who does something 1000's of times a year (the hygienist) or someone who does that same thing maybe a handful of times per year (the dentist) :idea:
As for the nitrous tanks, the "old" regulators were fun in that you could deliver 100% Nitrous, and literally asphyxiate them (in your Dad's situation i'm sure if he had a less than cooperative little kid every once and a while in his chair who he had to get a baby tooth out of this came in handy as you could "knock them out" for a few seconds, get the tooth out while the kid was out cold, and then deliver 100% oxygen and "bring them back" ). For the last few decades though, any regulators sold are plumbed so that it's impossible to deliver any Nitrous to the patient without atleast a 30% mixture of oxygen flowing (that's the baseline minimum level of oxygen in a "normal" individuals blood) to prevent any asphyxiation situations. And since the valves on the tanks are specific to the hook ups on the anesthesia machine, you can't say install 2 Nitrous tanks, instead of 1 Nitrous and 1 Oxygen tank to get the full 1000% "buzz" effect
It's just amazing that we all didn't kill ourselves off in the past with the "fun" that we could have before things became so regulated! :lol: