Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.
A MATTER OF PAIN
How much do you enjoy having dentistry performed on you? Never really fun is it? Sitting in the dentist’s chair is hardly one of your favourite pastimes. I remember how, as a primary-school kid, I had to walk from school to a dental nurse. I would have the discomfort of a tooth or two being drilled as a nurse pumped a treadle with its disconcerting whining sound. Very uncomfortable, especially as there was sometimes a nurse who was only just learning her craft. No anaesthetics were used, but then only little teeth were being dealt with. And of course we littlies would refer to a nurse’s room as “the murder house.”
Becoming a teenager, by which stage in my life anaesthetics were used, I almost became used to the nasty needle being pushed into my gums, and with them coming a nasty taste on my palate. For the rest of the day your lips seemed to swell as if you were a blob and for the rest of the day you tried to speak but you voice could only mumble. Those were the days when anaesthetics than were not so precise. Once jabbed in the gums and half of your mouth was benumbed.
Later in my teenagerhood, my mother said that I should have my wisdom teeth taken out before they appeared with pain. [So many people had told her that wisdom teeth gave one great pain as they slowly - over months – fully emerged]. So I was taken to a specialist. In this case I was there but I was not there, because one jab through the palate and I was completely knocked out for an hour as the specialist dug through my gums and pulled out the four culprits. I woke up groaning, my mouth filled with blood. My mother drove me home, me groggy and in a semi-coma. I fell into a deep sleep at home and woke three or four hours later, still dopy and with blood all over my pyjama top. Oh well, the real pain was no longer there.
And so the years went by. I have had root-canal work done. I’ve had some extractions done. Some bridges [connecting two teeth] have been made. I’ve experienced the years when amalgam began to be shunned by dentists because of mercury toxicity. Perhaps most important, I’ve experienced the new types of anaesthetics where a jab in the gums can deaden a single tooth only and you no longer get that sense of your whole mouth being blown up like a balloon. As I got older, I began to wonder that in my life so far, I might have had much dental work done partly because I had had braces put on my teeth when I was young… and I now think that orthodontists merely force teeth into the wrong places, creating more dental problems than they realised.
Regardless of what I have written about many unpleasant dental events, given my age I do not think my experience in the field is much different from that of the average New Zealander.
So why am I writing on this dismal topic?
Because this last week I had three upper front teeth taken out of my mouth. Yes, the dentist (a young Chinese woman) was excellent and knew her job thoroughly and yes the anaesthetics were up-to-date and did not hurt much even though the needle was pushed into gums and palate six times [I felt each jab, dammit]. But you can’t mask the awful c-c-c-errr -RACK as each of the three teeth was wrenched out. Then came the horror of having a plate – with artificial teeth – being pushed into the cavity where the real teeth had been. The plate rubbed against my gums, causing a little discomfort, and the plate was too tight. When I tried to pull it out again, it hurt like hell … so this week I had to go back later to have it adjusted.
Many years ago – long before I was born – it was common for people to have all their teeth taken out and then to wear false teeth. This was on the premise that it would save one from having to pay a fortune in dentistry. Maybe it made sense back then.
Well, have you been entertained with my dull story? When it comes to the matter of pain, I would agree that incidents involving a dentist are trivial compared with people dying of cancer or uncurable diseases, people dying or being injured in wars, horrible accidents on the roads etc. etc. But when you’re in a little pain, your sense of proportion vanishes and you think the world is collapsing. So in a moody state I scribbled out this piece of self-pity.
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