Yesterday I paid a long-overdue visit to the dentist.\u00c2\u00a0 I had been going to another dentist near my old office, but I stopped giving them the benefit of my extensive custom following certain ‘billing disagreements’ over what turned into several hundred dollars worth of ‘cleaning’ (and I use the term ‘worth’ very loosely…).\u00c2\u00a0 I didn’t think my teeth had actually gotten any worse since I left school as I don’t really have a lot of tooth left to get worse, on account of the school dentist (who I swear was paid by the tooth drilled) drilling out a large portion of most of my back teeth and replacing them with that lovely silver (now black) amalgam, but over the past couple of weeks I’ve been experiencing some slight pain, so I thought I really ought to go and have it looked at.\u00c2\u00a0 As I refuse to go back to my old dentist (and as I’ve moved office so they are no longer conveniently located) I had choose a new dentist. This time I picked one near home, working on the principle that if I came out after treatment looking like Sylvester Stallone, with one side of my face numb, I could just go home and work from there, and save my colleagues the sight of me dribbling out the corner of my mouth and talking like a drunken half-wit – they have problems enough with the English accent as it is…<\/p>\n
This new dentist (Dr. Marvin Olim) came highly recommended.\u00c2\u00a0 Actually, he was recommended to the wife by a friend of hers. The wife also needs to\u00c2\u00a0visit a dentist, but she’s of the firm belief that they’re all butchers who deliberately screw about with your teeth during ‘routine check-ups’ just to generate work for themselves further down the\u00c2\u00a0road,\u00c2\u00a0so she sent me along to Olim as a\u00c2\u00a0kind of canary down a coalmine.<\/p>\n
The\u00c2\u00a0dentist was\u00c2\u00a0reassuringly professional, and didn’t\u00c2\u00a0recoil in horror when he looked in my mouth, which I always take to be a good sign.\u00c2\u00a0 I did joke “Hey, I’m British, we’re all born<\/em> with bad teeth”, to which he replied “Oh, I’ve seen much<\/em> worse than this”, so I’m now thinking that maybe he used to be a vet, or he used to run a free clinic for transients. He started poking around, interjecting a disconcerting “Hmm, this looks interesting”, “Oh dear”, or “Well that’s<\/em> a cause for concern” every so often, inbetween scribbling away on one of those forms that have the square boxes for each tooth, although you couldn’t see my square boxes for all the red and blue pencil marks, by the time he’d finished. Thankfully, he didn’t declare that I was “beyond help” so I guess it could be worse.<\/p>\n He also noted that at least one of my teeth is still a baby tooth. Really.\u00c2\u00a0 Whilst it’s certainly not normal to still have baby teeth long after your\u00c2\u00a0wisdom teeth have been and gone, I like to think of it as just an embodiment of my\u00c2\u00a0youthful joie de vivre<\/em>.\u00c2\u00a0 (I’m joking, of course…)\u00c2\u00a0 However, it does explain how the spare tooth up my nose got there.\u00c2\u00a0 Alright, so it’s not actually up my nose<\/em>, but I do have an extra (33rd) tooth embedded somewhere in my upper jaw, at the front.\u00c2\u00a0 My doctor found it when they x-rayed my face prior to fixing my nose (correcting a deviated septum, not a nose job<\/em> I hasten to add – and a real<\/em> deviated septum at that, not one of the pretend ones that celebrities claim to have had fixed when they have really had nose jobs).\u00c2\u00a0 He (the doctor) simply remarked “Well, that<\/em> shouldn’t be there…” and never mentioned it again (probably because he’s a nose doctor and not a dentist).\u00c2\u00a0 So this extra tooth is apparently my adult tooth that never came through because the errant baby tooth refused to give up its place in my award-winning smile (even though there’s more than enough room to fit several more teeth in my mouth before I’d start to look as though my skull\u00c2\u00a0was trying to gnaw it’s way out of my face…).\u00c2\u00a0 The wife thinks it’s not an adult tooth at all, but actually my parasitic twin that I consumed in the womb, and this is all that’s left of him (or her – could explain a lot), like that bloke who found an eyeball in his guts.\u00c2\u00a0 (I know<\/em>! Eww. Never let it be said that I over-glamorize my life!).<\/p>\n Anyway, Dr Olim, DDS didn’t seem overly concerned with my twin Gnasher either.\u00c2\u00a0 He was more concerned with the alarming rate at which my teeth are wearing down. Apparently I grit my teeth quite a lot – I don’t grind them at night (which apparently a lot of people do) but I do spend most of the day with them clenched (a side-effect of working with idiots for so long, I guess…). Consequently the molars are all worn down at the back, and (I learnt) at least one of my other teeth has a crack in it. I did get all excited and one point when the dentist announced: “Hold on, we’ve got something here…”. I was waiting for him to pull out some kind of a transmitter or tracking device, so I could say “I knew<\/em>” it!” before stamping on it and running off down the street like Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man<\/em> (now there’s<\/em> a film to put you off the dentists) but it turned out to be just another cavity. Probably large enough to hide a transmitter the size of the one up Schwartzenegger’s nose in Total Recall<\/em> in, but sadly empty.<\/p>\n His last check was to see how badly my nerves were damaged. Personally I don’t see this as a problem – if there’s no nerves it can’t hurt – but he’d had his curiosity piqued (or at least something<\/em> piqued – if it was a cartoon he would have had dollar signs spinning round in his eyes…). “How do you do that?” I asked. “Keep jabbing around until my legs start twitching?” “Pretty much, yes.” he deadpanned. And he wasn’t joking, either. In what is either a dental procedure new since I last visited a dentist, or something just invented for his own amusement, the dentist poked what is essentially a pointy electric cattle-prod against my teeth, and gradually turned up the electric current until I said I could feel it – although saying<\/em> anything was out of the question with what felt like both his hands in my mouth, so I had to resort to the leg-flailing when I could eventually feel pain – which was only once the probe was set to an unusually-high level, the dentist noted with some consternation. Which I see as a testament to my high pain threshold and extensive training in anti-interrogation measures. Either that or my teeth really are shot to hell.<\/p>\n Anyway, after all the poking and (cattle) prodding, it turns out that I need four root-canals (wince!<\/em>) and a set of new crowns, which I’ll be starting on next week. “And once that’s done, we can start looking at what you originally came in for” the dentist concluded. Needless to say, the wife hasn’t made an appointment for herself just yet…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yesterday I paid a long-overdue visit to the dentist.\u00c2\u00a0 I had been going to another dentist near my old office, but I stopped […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[61,22],"class_list":["post-123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-dentists","tag-medical"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":192,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123\/revisions\/192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}