Sunday, January 14, 2007

Bzzzzzzzz

Today I would like to blog about the fact that I went to the dentist on Friday to have my teethicles drilled up. Now as a rule I do not like going to the dentist as when I was a wee lad I had strange teeth, which meant that I had to go to a specialistic dentistic hospital in London. At this institute I had several teeth ripped out from the gums, many a filling done, and even a brace inserted into my mouth. At one point I nearly passed out due to the unpleasant nature of having a filling. This was while I was being watched by a gaggle of interested-looking medical students and I suspect that the operation itself was actually performed by an under-qualified spotty indian teenager. After that somewhat bad experience I am somewhat desensitised to the unpleasantness of fillings; however, I still dislike attending the dentist for check-ups. There is something somehow ominous about having the dentist go through each and every one of your teeth one by one, calling out strange technical terms.

"Oclusar one two three, ok, dental four is inclusively intracted, dental five is sub-linear, dental five has a slight corrective misfunction. Second molar features an m-dimensional linear submanifold of R, signifying a Euclidean space of m dimensions".
(did you like all the fake dental terms that I just made up I think that they are quite clever and gives this blog an added and much-needed layer of biological science)

It is like having a spelling test where one mistake means that you have to have an uncomfortable and time-consuming medical procedure; and even worse, all of the correct spellings in the test are like mixed up versions of the real words. I know that this analogy makes no sense but luckily I am doing English at Oxford University so I can get away with whatever mixed metaphors I want, and just ascribe their logical disfunctions down to your lack of understanding/intelligence. But at the end of the day, it is very unnerving to have all these medical terms yelled out about your mouth with no knowledge of what they mean. I feel that it is a relief when at the end of the check-up the doctor says "I am sorry but I have to give you a filling" I mean at least then I have something definite. It is the waiting on the edge of my seat that I do not like. Although in this case I am lying firmly in a medical seat and am nowhere near the edge - I admit that that metaphor has weaknesses.

I am also aware that I could reduce the chances of needing medical procedures by brushing my teeth three times a day and not eating raw sugar when I am waiting for the kettle to boil in the morning. You could raise that argument; however, that simply necessitates the need for me to call in my omnipresent counter-argument of "I got into Oxford and thus everything that I do is correct and if I want to eat raw sugar and half-heartedly rub my teeth with a toothbrush twice a day than that is good enough for me". Equally, in this case the problem with my mouth was not down to me eating sugar but because a filling that had been done by the aforementioend clinic in London had cracked a bit and needed to be replaced. I am sorry but how I am I supposed to predict and prevent that? I no longer carry a full-scale smelting plant in my pocket and I have long ago stopped eating raw diamonds and Fabergé eggs. I consider myself an innocent bystander in all of this; however that point is moot as at the end of the day I found myself slumped in fear in a dentists chair being poked with needles by my nice lady dentist.

Oh yes did I mention that my dentist was a young thin scottish lady? Well my dentist was a young thin scottish lady, and her sidekick was from Brazil or Sweden or Poland or one of those loser countries far far away. Thinking about it perhaps she was Romanian; she spoke in a funny accent, she smoked a long pipe and when the scottish lady turned her back she tried to sell me beads and crucifixes to ward off evil mouth spirits. I am sorry the previous statement was probably racist and in many ways untrue; there are a huge minority of Romanian women are not vampire-fearing gypsies and in this case I was lucky. While I am on the subject of racism, I do not want to appear racist or sexist but if I think about it I reckon that every medical professional I have ever been to in the last decade has either been a woman, very young, or foreign. Or a combination of the above. I am sure that they all did a superb job (except obvious the fellow who put in my previous crackable filling), but sometimes I wish that I could be operated upon by an ageing white male with salt and pepper hair and a reassuring world-weary bedside manner; the sort of learned chap who has photographss of his grandchilden on his shelf along with golfing medals and who says "Now let's see what we've got here" as he checks out my mouth/wrist/other part of the body. Somebody like Carl Kennedy from Neighbours or maybe Lou. Except English, obviously. That would be swell. I feel that the world has moved on and we no longer get such sterling aged medical professionals working at the NHS. Equally, I feel that all of our doctor's assistants are now fat unattrative foreigners, which is a sad change from the previous "Misshapen Lisping Midgets Called Igor", which used to be the industry standard.
On the other hand, I have just recalled that such a wise aged doctor did have a look at my wrist when I suspected I had tendonitis and he was both rubbish and spaced - I fear that he had been huffing dope or whatever it is that these doctor people do in their spare time and was too mashed off his noggin to make a decent diagnosis. He just looked confused, then gave me some pills and sent me on my way.

So perhaps it was good that I had the young scot looking after my filling. After all, she did seem to do a very good job at things; I have no complaints whatsoever about the filling or the manner in which it was carried out. Actually yes I do; she missed the nerve with the first injection that she gave me and so had to dope me up with double the amount of anaesthetic so that I did not feel the pain of the work-tools mashing into my flesh. If you have not had your mouth numbed, you have missed a treat; it is a highly fun feeling. Like having a huge balloon of warm flesh tied to the side of your mouth. You spend the rest of the day poking it and saying "I know that this lip belongs to me, but... but... but... I just can't feel it!". It is a mightily fun feeling. A word of warning though: you can also quite easily bite through a huge hunk of your mouth-flesh by accident, as I did on one occasion when returning from the aforementioned clinic. I must have removed a good square centimetre of flesh from my entire lips (if you were to put all the chewed off flesh together in a little pile) through a combination of careless chomping and the "Let's see how deeply I can bite into my lip without it hurting" game. Unfortunately it started to hurt very hardcore when the anaesthetic wore off and I started to drip blood all over the Horrible Histories book that I was reading. My lip was swollen and ulcerated for about eight weeks after that incident.

Fortunately no such thing occurred today and I am now fighting fit again. However my jaw aches. I do not know if it is connected.

This is the full story of me going to the dentist. I hope that you enjoyed it. I certainly enjoyed writing it!

Today's Craptic Crossword Clue:
Break the sound barrier before the end of the fete for jungle-cutting instrument (7)

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