Pondering dental etiquette

I have to go to the dentist tomorrow for my semi-annual (more or less) teeth-cleaning appointment.  I do not enjoy time in the dental chair; never have, never will.  In anticipation of these trips, odd ideas often creep around in my head.  Today's concerns dental etiquette, specifically whether I should shave before the appointment.

My beard hair grows reasonably quickly, but I hate to shave.  That's why I wore a full beard for many years, and it's why I shave most of my face only occasionally.  As a result of my intermittent shaving strategy, however, my face mutates rapidly from smooth to rough to fine-grain sandpaper to coarse-grain sandpaper to whatever you call something that you could use to rub the slime and barnacles from the hull of a boat that's spent the last three years at the bottom of a particularly murky intracoastal waterway.

I'm currently at the fine-grain sandpaper stage; by morning, I'll be coarse-grain.

Do I shave before I go?

On the one hand, doing so seems considerate, and I do not mean to be rude to my dental hygienist.  (Never be rude to anyone wielding sharp instruments and poking around in your maw.)  On the other hand, she wears gloves and so may not give a damn.

You may consider shaving to be a task of no cost, but given that I have to do it in the morning, when I am a bear of little brain, and that it leaves parts of my face looking like someone's been slapping me around with chunks of poison ivy for half an hour, I do not enjoy it at all.

And so my brain spins round and round.