It feels like I’ve spent half my life at the dentist, despite diligent brushing and flossing. From explosive vomiting to epic extractions, join me on this surreal journey. Open wide…
What they say about New York City is also true of my mouth: it will be a great place – if they ever finish it.
Look, the comparison bears scrutiny. Structures rise up, they decay, they’re repaired, and finally replaced with something sturdy and modern but lacking the charm of what came before.
Somehow, despite all the equipment and the expertise brought to the task, the drilling never stops. The one reliable constant is that the expense of all the work will be eye-watering.
This comparison occurs to me one June day while I’m at the dentist waiting to have a filling replaced. This will prove to be one of the more surreal episodes in my storied and woeful dental record.
It’s a history that often seems unfair for someone who has never missed a brushing session in his entire life, who always preferred savoury snacks to sweet treats, and generally found sugary soft drinks too gassy to stomach.
I’m not sure where it all went wrong
I’m not really sure where it all went wrong. Did hypomineralisation leave me with fatally compromised molars? Did I brush too hard? Did I guzzle too much blackcurrant cordial in my youth or too many smoothies in my twenties?
Or is it mainly the fault of a single dentist in my distant past, the one whose charming bedside manner I later discovered had masked an utter lack of professional diligence?
A little of everything, perhaps. Even so, it still seems like pretty hard lines when I see what other people are able to eat and drink, while never needing to spend thousands of pounds on the consequences.
Gagging for a solution
So here I am, in the chair again, resigned to my fate.
There’s a dental dam across my mouth like a little blue tarpaulin, and I’m wearing those giant sunglasses that make you look like Dennis Rodman, or an elder from Bill and Ted’s future. In my left hand I’m holding a remote control, and in my right hand I’m clutching a hand mirror, in case of emergency.
The mirror is there to short circuit my hypersensitive gag reflex – a contraction so legendarily sensitive that, when an orthodontist took an impression of my teeth during my childhood, I reacted by vomiting explosively into the spittoon.
I vomited into the spittoon, forcing the surgery to close for the afternoon
Family folklore has it that the surgery was forced to close for the remainder of the afternoon to contend with the resulting blockage.
The gag reflex was a complicating factor in my dental visits for much of my twenties. X-rays of my mouth would always appear blurry, thanks to the retching tremors I suffered while holding a bitewing tab in my mouth.
Dental staff would peer speculatively at the grainy images they had captured, like soothsayers searching for something definitive in a meagre puddle of entrails.
At some point a dentist suggested we tried a new strategy: using a mirror to see if watching the dentistry unfold might short circuit the reflex. I’d read about how mirror therapy helped people to deal with phantom pain so it seemed worth a try. To everybody’s eternal relief, this approach reduced my sensitivity considerably.
There’s only so far the benefits will extend though: the throat-swabbing stage of a self-administered lateral flow test still requires nerves of steel and a preliminary pep talk.
(To me it seems something of a cosmic joke that, whether guarding myself against Covid or ongoing tooth decay, the central requirements are the same: periodic injections and regular gagging.)
Things start to get trippy
Back to the dentist’s chair. There’s a television screen embedded in the ceiling – strangely, this is something I’ve never registered before – and, because this is a longer appointment, the nurse offers to turn it on, so that I have some distraction during the procedure.
I’m given the remote control, but for technical reasons neither the channel nor the volume can be changed. The only entertainment available is a mute, subtitled edition of Celebrity Antiques Road Trip.
I watch a mute, subtitled edition of Celebrity Antiques Road Trip
Meanwhile, my dentist has selected a playlist of turn-of-the-century pop hits to help her focus on the job at hand; 5ive, B*Witched, Hear’Say, S Club 7, and so on.
My jaw aches a little but the gag reflex remains dormant; I can start to relax. At this point, the effects of a poor night’s sleep begin to catch up with me and things start to feel a bit trippy.
Celebrity Antiques Road Trip is already strange enough, with its bowls-club chumminess and its plodding, formulaic structure.
But this week’s guests are both impressionists, and their jokes are steamrolled by the subtitles: the captions on the screen prompt me to imagine not only the voice of Jan Ravens, but also Ravens doing an impression of Theresa May.
This I can just about do. But later I’m also expected to synthesise Ravens doing impressions of the antiques expert with whom she’s been paired, and whose voice I don’t even know.
It’s a little too much to process, like trying to follow along with the laugh track on a foreign sitcom.
An out-of-body experience
Meanwhile, the dentist’s retropop playlist transports a portion of my mind back in time, to sticky student night dance floors, and the goofy, salad days of music talent shows.
All the while, composite is being pressed methodically into my cavernous tooth, while dental jargon and workplace in-jokes go over my head.
At one point in the procedure, the spotlights are dimmed so the incredibly sensitive resin doesn’t set too rapidly.
I’m floating, numb and inert, in a psychic jacuzzi
Under these conditions I start to, if not fall asleep, drift on a hypnagogic current toward a kind of out-of-body experience. I’m trying to avoid nodding off completely lest I compromise the procedure, but also letting myself succumb to the moment.
You start to lose your sense of time in the dentist’s chair. In some scenarios you can even find yourself floating, numb and inert, in a kind of psychic jacuzzi, as I did at that moment.
Of course, you can also find yourself suffering through a nagging purgatory, dreaming of the moment you’ll be permitted to sit up, close your mouth, or reassert some dignity.
This was where I had found myself, three years earlier, having an monumentally stubborn lower right molar extracted, as a prelude to receiving an implant.
The procedure, scheduled for an hour, ultimately took more than two.
Releasing the little bird
I don’t exactly remember when it became clear that things weren’t quite going to plan, despite the heroic efforts of the specialist, just that I’d been there a long time and most of the tooth remained very much in situ. I started to wonder what I could do to help finish the job.
I began to think the tooth needed permission to leave
I began to think, well, maybe the tooth isn’t leaving because it doesn’t feel like it has permission. Maybe, on some level, I was actually holding on to the tooth, like an exhausted mother who just doesn’t believe she has the strength to push her baby out.
I channeled all my goodwill and serenity toward the immoveable molar. You can go, tooth, I thought, soothingly. It’s been lovely, but I’m letting you go.
I tried a positive visualisation. I imagined the tooth as a small white bird, waiting to be released from my cupped hands.
In retrospect, this was a poor visualisation. Any metaphorical bird representing my tooth would lack at least one of its wings and most of its feathers. Perhaps those shortcomings were the reason it couldn’t take flight.
Eventually, for reasons that had nothing to do with magical thinking and more to do with professional expertise, the deed was done. All that remained was a freshly dug grave in the wet, pink churchyard of my mouth.
Well, not all. I also had a large sore in the corner of my lips, a secondary infection in the bone and an addict’s longing for my next dose of co-codamol.
The garden of dread
The waiting area of my current dental practice is adjacent to an immaculately manicured garden, complete with a bench, a pristine lawn and a modest silver fountain.
The area suggests the tranquility of a meditation centre or a rehab clinic, yet often it has the opposite effect on me. The suggestion that this is a space for quiet contemplation, for acceptance in the face of trauma, only engenders a feeling of dread about what is to come.
Given my early experience of dental malpractice back in the 1990s, most of the dressing of the modern dental practice – the flatscreens, the fancy coffee-pod machine, the zen fountain – serves to reassure me that these days I’m in kinder and more competent hands.
But there are still times when I gaze out at that tidy garden – a vision of balance and affirmation – and wish instead that my waiting room were adjacent to something that admits of the messy, practical reality of dental work.
The noise and chaos of an inner-city building site would be more appropriate – a place that is forever being landscaped.
