Once when I was young and had a loose tooth, I asked my father, a dentist, to look at it.
“It needs to be pulled,” he told me. I frowned, dreading the experience. My dad sent me for some tissues and I envisioned them soaking up liters of blood from my mouth. I closed my eyes and braced myself. I was still waiting for him to pull when I heard my father say, “I’m done.” I opened my eyes and saw my tooth in his tissue-covered hand. I hadn’t felt anything, and there was just a bit of blood on the tissues. I thought my father was a magician.
The next day at school I bragged to a friend about my father’s remarkable feat. When I explained that the process hadn’t hurt, my friend called me a liar. He said that when his tooth was pulled, it had hurt a lot.