I'm not a big fan of dentists, not because they're horrible people (which they might be, it's hard to have an objective view when they're causing you pain) but because I have a mouthful of fillings from a very early age when every visit to the dentist resulted in a filling. And I don't like the drills whirring in my gob. After seeing a dentist only twice in the last twelve years I don't seem to have had much of a problem with my teeth. All this adds up to my conviction that dentists drilled for money -- which was literally true in the old days before NHS dentists spontaneously became private dentists and bumped their prices up by an order of magnitude -- and have therefore caused me unnecessary trauma.
Anyway, I explain my likelihood of whimpering like a baby to the
dentist and he explains that rotten teeth are caused by an infection
that could have been prevented by a simple injection. What?!
They could have given me one injection and saved my teeth? Can you
sue this late in the day?
The reason for being at the dentist was partly because a few months ago when chomping on a sandwich there was a crunch and a bit of a rear tooth fell off (revealing more ugly filling) and partly because everyone says you don't want to face some sort of drugged up wacko johnny foreigner dentist with posters from Marathon Man on the wall. I wonder if people coming to Britain worry about the same thing? I know I worry and I live here.
I couldn't tell if my dentist was drugged up or a wacko but was certainly foreign and instead of a poster had a hanging mobile thingy of some fish for me to stare at (childlike) when I could bear to open my eyes. He did have a TV and insisted on taking pictures of my mouth with his camera-on-a-stick contraption at various stages.
So, waiting for the anaesthetic to kick-in for him to remove the visible ugly filling and replace it with a white filling, we were chatting and it turns out his brother, Hilton Lewis, (he, David) has had a similar-ish career to me and is now the Technical Director at the WM Keck Observatory in Hawaii and that I should pay him a visit (I did think he said "Kitt" but it's hard to understand the South African accent and the Kitt Observatory turns out to be in Arizona). Good man. I wonder if there are any jobs going?
I must say, grudgingly, that he did a pretty good job and after
lots of re-shaping of the new filling demonstrated the dodgy efforts
made by previous dentists. You're grinding your teeth in your
sleep to try and get them to fit together,
he offered. I
understand that's generally a bad thing but I can't say as I've ever
noticed.
Copyright 2002 Ian Fitchet. All rights reserved.