I think this is true.
If you think this sounds unlikely, or ridiculous, then all it means is that you haven’t reached that stage in your life where your teeth have turned against you...yet. All we know is that it occurs at some point after marrying age in women. And that I have reached it, and eventually you will to (I’m presuming you’re a woman, if you’re a man then there’s probably some other part of your body that will cause you untold grief, and that you should have removed and replaced with plastic ones at the first available opportunity. Maybe your eyes... or your balls.) The point is, if the tooth extraction tradition isn’t already a thing, it definitely should be and I'm going to pioneer it.
I'll tell you why, strap yourself in, it's a long one...
My front teeth had been turning slowly outwards for the past few years. Assuming this was a natural part of the ageing process (‘That’s normal, isn’t it? Doesn’t everyone grow gradually more grotesque in their twenties?”) I ignored them, until one day, while out walking my dog, I found I couldn't ignore them any more. I was probing about in my own mouth with my tongue (it’s one of my many attractive habits) when I found a small, hard, lump on my pallet just behind my front teeth.
‘Well, that’s it.’ I thought. ‘I’m dead.’
I finished walking my dog, and quietly took myself home to die.
I had a dental appointment the next day, for a filling, and I figured that - if I made it through the night - I’d mention the death lump. I could see my dentist in my minds eye, staring at it for a few minutes, giving it a quick jab, and then sadly donning her black dental mask and wailing ‘Deeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeath!’ in the way that all dental professional are duty bound to do when they discover suspicious mouth lumps (trust me on this, my mother is a dentist, although you wouldn't guess it from everything that is about to follow).
What my dentist actually did the next morning was much worse. She stared at it for a few minutes, gave it a quick jab with a series of ‘diagnosing hooks’, then sat me up in the chair. She had the carefully neutral and panic-inducing expression that medical professionals adopt when they don’t want you to panic.
‘That doesn’t look good’ she said, solemnly.
‘Christ,” I thought “I really am dead!’
We marched together, a funereal procession of two, to ‘the x-ray room’. This, it turned out, was literally a chair in a cupboard at the back of the surgery. I could feel the radiation coming off the walls and upholstry, the biros on the shelf above me looked a little melty.
“What about that filling?” I asked innocently while she aimed a massive radiation gun at my head, and she looked at me as if - having just been diagnosed with ebola and co-morbid rabies, I’d asked “but isn’t there any thing you can do for my house-maids knee?”.
Ten minutes later she handed me a ghostly image of my teeth. There was a black nimbus of doom around the front ones.
“So thats cancer?” I said.
‘No, no the good news is, that’s probably fluid’
Although comparatively favourable news - good seemed like a stretch.
‘The fluid form of cancer?’
‘No the fluid form of fluid. Come back into the surgery. We can root treat it today.’
‘Like - a root canal? Isn’t that famously painful?’
She made a sound like she was deflating and then ventured
‘...sometimes.’
It turned out, three weeks and four failed root treatments later, that what she meant by ‘we can root treat it’ was, ‘we can’t root treat it’ and what she meant by ‘...sometimes’ was, ‘You will audibly whimper - on each of the four occasions that we have to do this.’
‘It’s beyond my ken, I'm afraid’ she said after the fourth go, washing her hands in a grimly symbolic fashion. ‘There is a possibility that rather than fluid it may be a cyst, or a fluid filled cyst, or cyst with fluid infection around it”
It was like she was just trying out the words ‘fluid’ and ‘cyst’ in different orders in search of the most disgusting combination.
“I’ll refer you to a specialist. Guys if you want to go national health’
‘I do’ I said, like a good socialist.
‘But the waiting list is sixth months, and, I’m going to be honest, this is a large infection, it might spread into your jaw, or sinus, and then on into your brain - if you leave it for more than about two.’
‘D-do you die if your brain becomes infected?”
She deflated again
“...sometimes”
I booked into the private specialist.
Later that day when I called my mother to explain what was happening, and ask to borrow a lot of money, she offered the following reassuring words...
“Oh, a tracking infection on the upper 2. That’s what killed Tutankamun.’
‘Oh! Good!” I said “Do you say that kind of crap to your patients?’
‘Of course. Everyone likes facts!’
"Not about things that might kill them!"
We’d discussed the possibility of her, as a dentist, doing the whole thing for free over the dining room table, but she refused on the flimsy grounds of 'ethics' which is almost always her excuse.
And so two weeks later I found myself in an up market surgery where a beautiful Central American woman called Sofia peered at my teeth and then asked...
“So, when were you hit in the mouth?”
I paused, wondering if I should be offended “I’ve never been hit in mouth”
“Oh, usually when there is something like that - it’s because people have been hit.”
“Oh.”
“In the mouth.” she added helpfully.
“Well, I’ve never been hit in the mouth.”
“I noticed you have a scar there below your lip. How did that happen?”
She said it as if expecting me to reply
“Oh that! That’s from when I was hit in the mouth!”
“I got it as a child.”
“Oh, it won’t be that then.” she shook her head “Well, I’m baffled, still I’ll do a root treatment”
It was a phrase I was growing increasingly weary of. While she got the instruments ready we chatted about my life.
“You sound creative.” she said.
I shrugged, mostly I felt infected.
“It must be wonderful to be creative, I’d give anything to be creative, but I’m not” she sighed sadly and pulled on some telescopic goggles “I’m precise!”
Good, I thought. No one wants a creative dentist. No one wants a dentist who at the end of surgery sits you up and explains...
“I know you came in for implants, but half way through I got a serious thing going, and I just sort of went with the flow - so - I’ve given you tusks”
... I wanted to tell her that precision in a dentist was exactly what I was looking for. But just as I was about to a large sheet of plastic was stretched over my mouth, and I was invalided out of the conversation.
“I’ll work through the plastic,” she said “It’s there to stop you swallowing my bleach”
“Ahhh-kghay” I said
What followed was two hours of re drilling past holes. The two teeth in question were dead now following the first four treatments, so it wasn’t that painful. What was unexpectedly painful though was having to listen to the conversation above me while not being able to join in. It was, almost agonisingly interesting, Sofia and her nurse covered everything from the exact nature of creativity, to the culture of meso-America, through literature to cinema, and the nurse, frankly, was not pulling her weight.
By the time they got to classic films I couldn’t bare it any more.
“Now what is that one? With Tom Hanks?” said Sofia “He’s on an island. Tch, I know the title in Spanish, just not in English.” The nurse shrugged...
“Lost?”
“No, no”
“Caddyshack?”
There was clearly something wrong with her. They both paused, Sofia actually lowered the drill and stared into the middle distance for a while, as they both silently grasped after the title.
“Aaaasst-aaaawaaagh!” I cried in frustration.
“What? Are you in pain?” they set about removing my plastic mouth obscurer hurriedly.
“Castaway!” I gasped, “That film with Tom Hanks, it’s called Castaway!”
“That’s right,” she said smiling, “Castaway... so anyway, that’s a good film!”
They reassembled my plastic sheet-gag, signalling a perminant end to my role in the conversation.
Despite Sofia’s levels of precision, and masterful taste in films, the fifth root treatment didn’t work either. It looked like it had for a while. But then the lump grew and swelled, and developed an angry blister, I ended up back at the practice in under a month haemoraging fear and money. They booked me an emergency appointment with their next available dentist, and the moment he walked out of the surgery, all thoughts of my painful and imminent death evaporated.
He was, without a doubt, the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. The sort of tall, proud, hispanic eagle man, that I’d thought only existed on the covers of large print Mills and Boon.
“Jesus!” I whispered, which, it turned out, was his name.
It was as if private practice employed only stunningly beautiful South American people. Come to think of it since my treatments both privately and nationally had failed it was possible that that was the only real difference. The private sector employed stunners and charged you to gaze upon their loveliness, while the NHS employed my mother, and didn't.
I resolved that something beautiful would come of my teeth trying to kill me. Over the course of the coming operation, I would seduce this man-god. If everything went according to plan we'd be married within the year.
Jesus sat me down and leafed through my notes, ‘Wow, you’ve been through a lot." I nodded in a tragic but self-effacing way - that I thought was probably quite winning. He went through the arcane tooth counting ritual that all dentists do to praise the teeth gods, and started prodding at my gums. As he went about it I pictured myself tight in his embrace on the cover of our erotic novel, my hair falling over my bare shoulders, a rose in my teeth. And his face staring down at me with angry Venezuelan lust. The title above us ‘Love in the Time of Cancer Scares’ or possibly ‘Root Canal to My Heart!’
‘Bite for me’ he said. That would probably be a line in it, I thought to myself, it’s a little kinky but that’s what sells in this post-50 Shades market.
‘No bite normally, are you biting normally?’
‘Yes, this is just the way my weird teeth fit together’
‘Oh!’ he said, in the least aroused way ever. ‘Oh, that is weird.’
I felt like we weren’t off to an auspicious start, but then again, if I had the kind of teeth that could wow a man I wouldn’t be there in the first place.
“So when were you hit in the face?” he said.
When we'd been through that debarcle again, he treated me to a short explanatory speech on exactly what was happening in my head (well in my face, it was best for all involved that he didn’t know what was happening in my head). There was some kind of tumour above my front tooth, the infection around it had eaten away at the bone and he planned to cut an opening at the front, remove the tissue and surrounding infection, trim the root of my tooth and then sew every thing back up again.
At least, that was the gist. It was hard to focus on the details - his voice was so soft and gently accented, it was like a lullaby - a beautiful lullaby about surgery and tumours.
He massaged a numbing gel into my gums with an gloved index finger. I just had time to lock eyes with him, flirtatiously, before a series of five fantastically painful injections across the front of my mouth made me screw my eyes tightly shut.
In his defence he was genuinely contrite about having to do this, it made me want to hug him. ‘I’m so sorry’ he said putting the needle away. He gave me a rueful grimace and then got out something that I genuinely assumed was a prop from a 70s comedy sketch about dentistry. As syringes go it was grotesquely oversized. It looked like something you might inseminate a horse with.
“This one - will hurt’ he said, ‘But once it is over, you won’t feel anything else’
Sounds like it is going to kill me, I thought.
It went straight in to middle of my pallet and was the most excruitiating thing I’ve ever experienced. “I’m so sorry, Anna, really I’m so, so sorry” Jesus cooed softly.
I could feel his breath against my cheek like a summer breeze.
I realised with mounting horror that as well as being in incredible pain, I was also, simultaneously, quite aroused. He was just so handsome, speaking to me so softly and kindly - at the same time though really ramming home that massive needle into my pallet! The cognative dissonance was difficult, I found myself hoping that I wasn’t forever going to connect the two things and that, perhaps, I had paid a staggering amount of money to have a portion of my tooth removed and that the upshot of it was that it had also turned me into a sadist. From here on in I might only be able to get my jollies if someone was piercing the roof of my mouth with metal.
Fortunately though Jesus was right, after he removed the cartoonishly large syringe from my mouth all pain subsided and I was left only with the vision of his beauty and an entirely numb face.
“How are you feeling?” he asked,
“Like I dont have a nose,” I said playfully batting myself in the face a couple of times, in a way that I hoped he thought was endearing (though looking back he was probably thinking “for God's sake, stop hitting yourself in the face, thats how you got into this mess!”)
He gave me a cup of antispectic to swish around my mouth, and I dribbled it down myself and the chair, “Sorry,” I said “I can’t feel my lips,” (‘or my right eye, or any part of my forehead. Do you want to marry me yet?’).
The process took four hours. Four hours - just him and me (and that nurse who thought Tom Hanks was in Caddyshack but she kept quiet) I felt like we really grew close in those four hours. How can you not grow close with someone when they are cutting away a small section of your mouth over the course of an afternoon. It's a tremendously intimate process.
When we finished he gave me a mirror so I could appreciate just how swollen and smeared in my own gore I was. I looked from my monstrousness to his saintly bronzed face. I wanted to make one final plea ‘Look, look, I know I don't seem much now, not now, but... you should see me after a good facial, and when I'm able to talk! and, well, you are splattered with my blood, so, you probably don't realise it but... once two people have been through something like this... and there is only about 5 years between us tops... look, I’m just a woman, standing in front of an endodontist,' etc. but all that came out was...
“I jsth phuuu”
He smiled in polite incomprehension, and as I was leaving said
“I’ll call you”
“Whas?”
“With the results of the biopsy, from the tissue I removed. Don’t worry...” he added “It’s very unlikely to be malignant.”
What? What? Was that back on the cards again now? Even marginally? Very unlikey. Very unlikely. I tried to hold on to that phrase, while in my head Jesus donned his ceremonial black dental mask, stood up and wailed "Deeeeeeeeaaaaaattttttth" at me until I left the room.
It wasn’t cancer. Obviously. If it were I think I would have devoted less of this blog to how attractive Jesus was and more of it to coming to terms with my mortality. It was, and I will quote my mother directly here "just one of those tumour-y-cysts you sometimes get". It's given me pause though - the trauma of five root canals, and one surgical procedure. That's 14 hours in total. 14 hours. How long would it take to have them all out and plastic ones put in? Probably 13 hours tops and they could have removed the infected tissue while they were about it.
So thats the plan now. That's how I will recoop my monetary losses from this whole horrible venture. I'm pretty sure I can rope my mother into doing it, for a nominal service charge, over the dining room table and I urge all woman of marrying age who are reading to visit and have it done. I know it sounds unspeakably grim now, but, trust me, you will thank me later.
