Dental On My Mind …

Nothing like lying back helplessly horizontal on a red leather dentist’s chair to make a man of my autumn years feel like an anxious little kid again. 

This same older man who wakes every morning with an old ache or a new twinge, that could disappear in a minute or last a fortnight, and has a head that struggles to remember names and why I am looking in that cupboard but can never forget  incidents from long, long ago.

Still visited by macabre memories of trembling visits to the more primitive exponents of dental malpractice back in the day. Like the guy who literally leaned on my puny little chest as he tugged and tugged at at the last recaltricant fragment of a departing molar.

A gas man altogether — pity he didn’t use any on me that day —  when my roar had subsided, he patted me kindly on my shoulder and helped me to stand. Telling me what a good, brave boy I was. Like I had had any choice in the matter. Knowing everyone in the dispensary had heard my scream, he opened the door to the waiting room, and rubbing his gloved hands together and smiling with fiendish glee, whispered ‘Next!” Before bursting into laughter as he surveyed the row of white faces. 

Trying not to look at the searing overhead light now, even with these ridiculous aviator shades on, I am staring into the twin abysses of a huge pair of hairy nostrilled caverns, which soon disappear behind a sinister surgical mask. 

Of course the notorious dental torture scene in the movie Marathon Man with nasty Nazi dentist Dr Szell (Laurence Olivier) going at petrified Babe Levy (Dustin Hoffman) always comes to mind, however fleetingly, in these situations.

A first few whirrs of that whirry hand tool, a pause for his trusty nurse sidekick to hoover up my enamel-flecked spittle with that ferocious hand-held saliva sucker yoke, and the looming face of Dr Szell … I mean the lovely Kevin N … is telling me I’m doing ‘really well’, as he pauses for another lunge down into my gaping maw with that Dr Doom torture drill … or it could be the scraper thingie that rakes along that place where tooth meets gum, picking and scratching at my depleting gnashers. Plucking out plaque, tearing down tartar, and scouring all the while for impending cavities and possible orthodontic calamities.

And the thing is as he says this in his best soothing tones  I do feel like I am doing well and am a very good boy indeed. 

You would hope Dr Kev knows nothing of the thoughts and sinister associations swirling round the brain of this grizzled grey-beard stretched beneath him, splayed feet in the air like in those deadly post-mortem scenes in those gruesome murder investigation procedurals my wife and I love.

Sure isn’t it all great towards years ago, when there was no pre-anaesthetic anaesthetic, and the big jabby yoke with its huge, thick needle would be thrust straight into your puny little gum …

The needle and the damage done.

No, they couldn’t be nicer here, and sure it’s only a few moments of discomfort as the main man picks and chooses what parts of the miniature tusks of this here Toothankamun still pass muster, and polishes off my fangs with a last few theatrical whizzes and buzzes inside my stretched out gob, that resound inside my head with reverbating resonance.

Some part of my big so-called grown up self still finds it almost bizarre, however, that I have to actually pay cash money for this whole oral invasion, rather than the other way round.

But sure amen’t I lucky to still have teeth — my own and others’ — to subject to this benign torture?

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