Thar's gold in them thar teeth

So I paid a visit to the dentist this week. He poked and prodded and gouged and scraped for about a year or so before telling me something I’ve never before heard from a member of his profession.

“OK, everything looks pretty good. You need to floss more but otherwise you’re in good shape.”

And that was that. No fillings, no root canals, no extractions or any of the other countless procedures dentists have insisted I needed over the years. To say I was shocked is putting it mildly.

As far as I’m concerned, dentists rank right up there with vivisectionists and proctologists in the “Why on earth would someone choose to do that for a living” stakes and I’m sure most of them are simply frustrated sociopaths at heart. Oh, they pretend to be nice, and lure you in with their soft music, and pretty assistants and fresh copies of Sports Illustrated but once they have you back in the soundproof room, away from the other clients, that’s when their true personalities come out.

I know for a fact my childhood dentist’s training consisted of watching Laurence Olivier working Dustin Hoffman over in Marathon Man. He was the one that told me

“It’s your own fault; if you took better care of your teeth I wouldn’t have to hurt you!”

I was eight at the time.

Many years later, a doctor explained that the reason my teeth were so poor was not due to lack of hygiene or too many sweets, (although I’m sure that didn’t help) but from a side effect of the asthma medication I’d taken regularly as a child. Medication which was later taken off the market as a result of said side effect. Had it been prescribed by an American doctor, I could probably have sued and had more money to spend on beer than I do now.

But, that wasn’t much consolation as my childhood dentist was just one of a long string of swines who’ve put their kids through college or made their boat payments as a result of the metaphorical gold they found in my teeth.

It doesn’t help that I suffer from a severe pain allergy and have a very low tolerance for people poking sharp points into my nerve endings. With a mouth chock full of scrap metal and drool running down my cheek (does that vacuum cleaner attachment thing do any good) my imagination works overtime as I trying and guess just what this particular instrument of torture is doing. It came as something of a surprise when a dentist in Phoenix actually explained what he was doing (it never occurred to me to ask) and I learned that despite the horrors I was imagining, he was merely polishing my teeth, or running some floss between them. Until then, I was convinced he was trying to rip my teeth out one by one with rusty pliers, or seeing how far he could push an ice pick into my jaw.

Then don’t get me started on the sadist who had me return again and again so she could work on the same root canal. Her story was that it was such a major project it had to be done in stages “to make things easier on me”. As is often the way, my company changed Insurance Providers before the job was done and I had to find a new dentist. He cheerfully told me the tooth was perfectly healthy, but I needed a ton of other work done and how do Tuesday mornings look for the next two months?

There was also the guy who conspired with Dear Wife to bully me into having my wisdom teeth removed. I was perfectly content to leave them where they were, figuring I need all the wisdom I could get, but apparently they were blocking his access to a different tooth which he claimed needed work. So, against my better judgment, I scheduled a couple of days off work, stocked the house with chocolate pudding and baby food, and went in for the ‘routine’ appointment. Two weeks later, I was still doped to the eyeballs on painkillers, unable to eat anything larger than a thin mint and the sinus infection I contracted via the nostril to mouth hole he left in my jaw still troubles me to this day.

It’s not entirely the dentists’ fault either – medication side effects apart, I think I must have been in the bathroom when they were handing out teeth as my set seem to be particularly poor quality. When I was traveling in Asia for instance, everyone told me “If you need dental work done, go to a Singaporean dentist – they’re the best.” Except when I was actually in Singapore, I wimped out. My teeth were fine, what’s the problem?

Well, the problem was the toothache from hell which fired up the day after I arrived in Indonesia. Constant, throbbing, aching, blinding pain that never let up for a moment. Just the thing when you’re eating the spicy food for which Indonesia is rightfully famous. After three days of torment I made the decision to spend money I could ill afford flying back to Singapore for treatment. And the toothache immediately went away. Until I was on a train heading away from Singapore when it came back. And lasted until I was close to the next major airport, when it went away again.

You would think that once I’d figured out the pain was psychosomatic that would have been the end of it but noooooo. It came and went for the next two months, with the pain level in inverse proportion to my ease of access to a flight to Singapore. And for the record, when I made it home to Britain a year later, my dentist at the time assured me there was nothing wrong with the tooth.

It’s hard to like dentists when even your teeth are vindictive.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to floss.